O-I Glass history

In 1935 Owens-Illinois acquired the Libbey-Glass Company and entered the consumer tableware field.

The two firms agreed to cooperate and formed Owens-Corning Fiberglass in 1938.

The company purchased the land near the Veterans Administration Hospital in 1940, with the plant opening four years later.

With its success came expansion, and the company opened a plant in Waco, Texas, on February 22, 1944.

In the 1950’s Owens-Illinois took another step outside the glass container field, into a promising new area-plastics.

The company steadily expanded the Waco plant, constructing new furnaces and employing 725 people by its tenth anniversary in 1954.

The first significant diversification move came in 1956 when Owens purchased the National Container Corporation, America's third largest box maker at the time.

In 1958 Owens-Illinois persuaded a number of large bleach and laundry detergent companies to switch to the new bottles.

The 1960’s were years of tremendous growth in both can and bottle manufacturing.

The new cans were also designed to increase sales, as major bleach companies had switched to plastic containers in 1961 and delivered a hit to the Waco plant’s profits, resulting in the layoff of 21 percent of the employees.

Yet the biggest change came in 1964 with the invention of Spectra Glas, the country’s first colored glass.

In 1965, the company changed its name one final time.

Waco employees had always been part of the Glass Bottle Blowers Association and other unions, and after a nationwide strike in 1968 the Waco plant saw continued struggles for better working conditions.

As beverage sales leveled off in the 1970’s, the container industry found itself in the midst of a worldwide recession.

In his 1971 study on water pollution, Nader cited Owens-Illinois as the industrial company with the best record on environmental issues.

The height of production for the Alton plant was in 1973, with 2,400 workers that operated nine of the ten available furnaces and 31 bottle-forming machines.

As Owens-Illinois entered the 1980’s its production costs advantage, once the envy of the industry, had been eroded.

Thatcher Glass, once number two in the industry, went bankrupt in 1981, its failure the product of a poorly executed leveraged buyout (LBO) and an unwillingness to rebuild old furnaces and install new technology.

On July 27, 1983 news broke that the Alton plant would close due to a lack of business, leaving 17 plants open nationwide.

On December 11, 1986, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Company (KKR), a holding company specializing in taking firms private, offered to purchase Owens-Illinois for $55 per share.

Owens-Illinois took its case to federal court, winning an appeal in 1988.

In December 1991 KKR took Owens-Illinois public once again, through an initial public offering (IPO) that raised about $1.3 billion.

The 1992 acquisition of Specialty Packaging Products, Inc., brought Owens-Illinois a leading United States manufacturer of trigger sprayers and finger pumps, with annual sales of $100 million.

The proceeds were used to further pay down debt, which by 1993 stood at $2.5 billion.

Also in 1994 Libbey Glass was spun off, becoming the publicly traded Libbey Inc.

By the end of 1997 Owens-Illinois had settled claims involving about 210,000 claimants, with an average payment per claim of $4,200.

In April 1998 Owens-Illinois paid $3.6 billion in cash for the worldwide glass and plastics packaging businesses of BTR plc of the United Kingdom, in the largest acquisition in company history.

By 1999 non-United States revenue accounted for 42 percent of overall company revenue, which reached a record $5.52 billion.

While attempting to manage a debt load that stood at $5.85 billion at the end of 2000, leading to interest payments that year of $486.7 million, Owens-Illinois continued to contend with its asbestos hangover.

Also in 2001, Owens-Illinois sold Harbor Capital Advisors, Inc., its asset-management unit, to the Dutch firm Robeco Groep N.V. for approximately $490 million.

In the fourth quarter of 2003 the company divested its plastic trigger sprayers and finger pumps manufacturing operations, which had been deemed noncore and thereby expendable.

Shepherding this deal to completion was Steven R. McCracken, brought onboard as president and CEO in April 2004, and the first outsider to head the firm.

The sale reduced the investment firm's stake to less than 2 percent, a holding further slashed in 2005, when the last of the KKR directors resigned from the Owens-Illinois board.

The new headquarters were officially opened in August 2006.

Even though Owens-Illinois left Madison County officially in 2009, the impact it had on the community helped make Alton a booming industrial town.

The city of Waco worked hard to keep the plant running and to preserve as many jobs as possible, in 2010 even giving the plant a $2,500 sales tax reimbursement for every employee kept on the payroll.

In 2012, the company announced an $8 million upgrade to the Waco plant to make it more environmentally friendly and up to date.