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[Image above] Credit: PENGLAI INDUSTRIAL CORP LTD SHENZHEN&GUANGZHOU; YouTube

There’s a lot of glass in our everyday lives.

The material is so ubiquitous in our modern, tech-enabled world that we often don’t even recognize it for the engineering marvel that it is.

We interface or rely upon glass continuously throughout our day—from the messy-haired reflection that the bathroom mirror provides every morning, to the ability to check the weather through your home’s window, to the protection and visibility afforded on the morning commute by your car’s windshield. Not to mention how much those thin pieces of glass on your computer and smartphone screens capture your daily attention.

And at the end of the day, many people choose to unwind with an alcoholic beverage—and that, too, largely relies upon glass. Whether a wine glass, a beer bottle, or a cocktail glass holds your drink of choice, the alcohol industry and the glass packaging industry are intensely intertwined.

Alcohol accounts for a large proportion of the global glass packaging market—currently valued at more than $40 billion and expected to reach $55 billion by 2020, according to a Transparency Market Research report. According to the report, alcoholic beverages excluding beer accounted for 40% of the 2013 glass packaging market.

And that’s without beer, which is a huge and growing industry in itself.

So the next time you crack open a glass bottle of your favorite beverage, take a look at the bottle—it’s an engineering marvel.

That glass bottle likely made a long journey from a glass plant to a brewery to a grocery store (and likely several steps along the way) before finding its way into your refrigerator—all without breaking, degrading, or contaminating the product inside.

But how did that glass bottle get into its remarkably useful form? Watch this short video to learn how—Chinese glass manufacturer Penglai Industrial Corp. Ltd. opens its plant doors to show us how it manufactures glass bottles.

Credit: PENGLAI INDUSTRIAL CORP LTD SHENZHEN&GUANGZHOU; YouTube

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