Glass surrounds us everywhere.

Glass surrounds us everywhere: windows in buildings or cars, aquariums, dishes, decorative items, chemical containers in industry and medicine, etc.

Modern production technologies allow us to obtain glass with a wide variety of characteristics and qualities:

• Household. It is used in everyday life: dishes, glasses, decorative items.
• Technical. This is a very dense glass used in heavy industry.
• Construction sheet. It is used to make display cases, stained glass windows, and windows.
• Bulletproof. Used to increase the security of buildings, cars, etc.

Therefore, as part of the Week of Construction Disciplines, students of groups 31-D, 41-D, 31-B, 5-BB and 6-BB, teachers Iryna CHORNYA, Yuriy HRYSHCHUK, Anatoly IVANCHENKO and Taras SASOVSKY, were given an excursion to a modern glass production enterprise in the village of Zorya, Rivne district, LLC “VERALIYA UKRAINE”.

“VERALIA UKRAINE” LLC produces glass containers for beverages and food. The direct parent company is the German Verallia Deutschland, and the actual control is exercised by Verallia Packaging. The Verallia Group is the European leader and the third largest manufacturer of glass containers for beverages and food in the world. It has 32 glass factories, three decoration factories and 8 cullet processing centers (glassworks) in 11 countries, annually producing 16 billion glass bottles and jars for supply to 10 thousand companies - from local family manufacturers to large international brands.

Glass production is usually based on just four main ingredients, and each of them has its own role in the process of creating glass products:

• Quartz sand is the base, its melting point is about 1600⁰C.
• Soda - helps reduce the melting point of sand by half and significantly simplifies the manufacturing process.
• Lime is a component necessary for water resistance. If it were not for it, we would not be able to put flowers in a vase or drink tea from a glass, as water would simply dissolve such an alloy.
• Glass crushing – allows you to reduce energy consumption and CO emissions₂.

Glassmaking is a very hot, laborious and dangerous process. First, all the components are mixed and melted in a special furnace. After the grains of sand are combined with each other, turning into a homogeneous mass, it is sent to a bath of molten tin (its temperature is above 1000⁰С). The glass mixture will float on the surface due to the difference in the density of the materials. The less mass is in the tin container, the thinner the sample will be. After that, the blanks are cooled on a special conveyor.

Representative of LLC “VERALIYA UKRAINE” ZUBENKO Anastasia, gave an introductory lecture about the company, its features and history and a tour of the production enterprise itself, telling the students about the features of the glass production process, production technology, assortment and product features.

During the excursion, the students received a lot of new and interesting information about glass production.