How Glass is Made

How is Glass made? 

The simple answer is: Glass is made from a mixture of sand, lime and soda. When these ingredients are heated together, they form a liquid glass.

But the art of manufacturing glass goes back a long way. It is a process, which has been refined for thousands of years after being invented in ancient Persia and Egypt. Therefore, glass is one of the oldest and most versatile human-created materials. All the core ingredients occur naturally and in abundance in nature. With technology becoming increasingly advanced, we use glass every day from drinking glasses to eye-wear to BowlPhish glass wipe boards of course.

First steps

As mentioned in the sub header, glass is made from sand. Yes, that's right - the same sand that you can find at a beach or in the desert. There are in total four main ingredients that make up glass: Sand (Silicon Dioxide), Soda Ash (Sodium Carbonate), Limestone (Calcium Carbonate) and Recycled Glass. You can make glass by heating those ingredients until it melts and turns into a liquid. But don't worry, you won't find this happening on your local beach: sand only melts at the incredibly high temperature of 1700°C (3090°F). And we are pretty sure, that all beaches would be deserted and several severe weather warning would be in place in case temperatures would reach such levels. Back to the glass: As the molten sand cools, it becomes Amorphous solid. There are many benefits of using these materials as sodium carbonate reduces the melting point and saves energy and calcium carbonate strengthens the glass.

As glass can be recycled over and over again, most glass is made, containing at least some amount of recycled glass.

What happens next

Glass is formed by different methods depending on the type of product you want to or have been asked to produce. 

• "Poured" into moulds to make bottles and containers. 
• "Blown" to make bespoke shapes.  
• "Floated" which is poured on top of vat of molten tin metal. This makes it perfectly flat for windows and glass boards.
  

To make specialist glass, manufactures will add metallic compounds to create different colours, toughen the glass by cooling the molten more quickly, which means it will be  stronger and safer. Bullet proof glass is also classified as specialist glass and is made from multiple layers of glass and plastic, which are bonded together.

BowlPhish Glass

Here at The Glass Wipe Board Company's, we make sure that our glass gets recycled by being melted and made into new products. Alternatively,  the glass is recovered and gets ground down and is used within new road surfaces for example.

To see how beautiful and stylish our products are, check out our Product Page  or to see a summary of the whole glass making process, watch your "Ideas of the Week" video on How Glass is Made below.