Owens-Illinois To Build $120M Bottle Plant

WINDSOR, CO-Thanks to the efforts of Gov. Bill Owens, local community economic development officials, and the Denver-based OmniTRAX, a railroad company owned by the privately held Broe Cos., Toledo, OH-based Owens-Illinois picked this small northern Colorado town as the site for a $120 million bottle plant.

The plant, the first new one built by Owens-Illinois in 23 years, is a huge economic win for northern Colorado.It will create 150 high-paying jobs. The new state-of-the-art facility, the biggest owned by Owens-Illinois, will cover more than 500,000 sf and produce a billion bottles a year.

“I congratulate Owens-Illinois on selecting Windsor for its new bottling plant,” Gov. Owens says. “We look forward to a long-lasting and productive relationship with Owens-Illinois. I also congratulate Weld County, Windsor and the Greeley/Weld Economic Development Action Partnership (EDAP) for working so hard this past year to help make this possible.”

The plant will be eight miles east of Windsor in Weld County.

OmniTRAX bought the land where the facility will be built.

“Our team did a fantastic job of finding the site, rezoning it and resolving the many obstacles that arose in preparing the site for Owens-Illinois,” says Dwight Johnson, president of OmniTRAX, which owns the Great Western Railway, which will transport raw materials to the new facility, as well as the finished bottles to the Anheuser-Busch plant 20 miles away in Fort Collins.

By locating the plant in the Windsor area, Owens-Illinois has the opportunity for optimum pricing of transportation of its raw materials because of our ability to connect to both the Burlington Northern Santa Fe and Union Pacific Railroads to this location,” he says.

Tom Henley, spokesman for the Broe Cos., tells GlobeSt.com that it will retain about 60 acres adjacent to the site, which it will develop as an industrial park.

Owens-Illinois evaluated potential sites in Colorado and Wyoming based on operational andlogistical criteria including proximity to its customer base and accessibility to natural gas, power, highway, railroad and workforce.”We are pleased to become part of northern Colorado and the Windsor community,” says Joseph H. Lemieux, Owens-Illinois chairman and CEO. “We look forward to working with the state of Colorado, Weld County and the town of Windsor in continuing what we hope to be a successful partnership. Our new high-productivity plant will be among the most efficient glass container plants in the world.

Construction will begin once designs are finalized and permit applications are approved. The plant is expected to start production in January 2005.

With the new Windsor facility, Owens-Illinois will have 25 glass container manufacturing plants in North America, 19 of which are in the US. Owens-Illinois is the largest manufacturer of glass containers in North America, South America, Australia and New Zealand, and one of the largest in Europe.