Story Photos
 Concrete worker Tony Carnevale completes an entrance to the Cameron Glass plant in Kalama last week. Roger Werth / The Daily News
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Kalama wine bottle plant is truly international
Monday, July 28, 2008 8:43 AM PDT
By Erik Olson
Printable version
E-mail this articleKALAMA — The batch bins, where sand and minerals flow through before they become glass, came to the Cameron Family Glass Packaging plant from England.
The bottle machines, which form the glass, were imported from Sweden.
And the trioteck palletizer, where the glass wine bottles are packaged for shipment, was manufactured in Germany.
“Each one of the countries represented is a strong glass producer,” said Matt Ouellette, senior project manager for JH Kelly, the Longview-based contractor that’s building the plant.
Construction of the $80 million facility — expected to open Oct. 28 — has been an international affair for JH Kelly. Company officials have traveled to Europe and Asia, touring working glass plants to learn how to construct the facility on 13.1 acres at the Port of Kalama.
Ouellette admitted he knew “nothing” about glass manufacturing when the Pennsylvania-based Cameron family hired JH Kelly to build the plant two years ago. No glass plant has been built in the United States in 35 years, which is why JH Kelly has logged so many overseas frequent-flyer miles to learn the business.
“Manufacturing coming back to the U.S. is a good thing,” Ouellette said.
The plant will bring 80 family-wage jobs to Cowlitz County at a time when the unemployment rate is hovering near 9 percent.
The glass manufacturing starts in the 186-foot tall batch house, where the sand, limestone, soda ash and other minerals are loaded. The product is heated to temperatures as high as 2,100 degree Fahrenheit, and the glass is fired in gobs of viscous material to be shaped and stamped into the bottle requested by the customer.
“It’s like a gun turret. An orange, quick flare. That’s the glass going through. It’s fast,” said Ron Cramer, JH Kelly’s project manager.
Each bottle machine will produce 230 bottles per minute, which adds up to 144 million bottles per year for wineries in the Pacific Northwest and beyond.
Washington is second only to California in the amount of wine produced annually, and it’s growing, according to the Washington Wine Commission. The number of Washington wineries has more than doubled to at least 540 since 2003, and sales of Washington wines jumped 22 percent in 2007, well above the 7.9 percent increase in U.S. sales.
Those trends translate into a “growing market for suppliers” such as Cameron Glass, said Ryan Pennington, spokesman for the wine commission.
The Cameron project is among the largest in JH Kelly’s history, and the international flair of the project didn’t come without challenges. The sagging dollar coupled with the surging Euro meant higher costs for purchasing the English, Swedish and German parts, Ouellette said.
But the biggest challenges involved differences in language and culture. No one at JH Kelly spoke Chinese for a Beijing visit, where company officials go to see the early construction of building for the 2008 Summer Olympics, Ouellette said.
Even in England, the parts manufacturers tended to keep some information close to the vest, which required JH Kelly to keep in constant contact to understand how to put the plant together, Cramer, the project manager, said.
“The key to it has been communication,” he said.
The project is a “turn key” operation, which means JH Kelly must build the plant, make sure it’s running with less than 10 percent flawed bottles, then turn the keys over to the Cameron Family, Ouellette said.
The risk, then, is with the builder, who must work out the kinks. But Ouellette said the plant will be ready by the target date in October.
“This is the techology that gives them the ability to be a very top-end producer of bottles,” Ouellette said.
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Atrucker wrote on Jul 28, 2008 11:46 AM:
Any way this plant will bring in jobs that we need around here . "
bulldog42 wrote on Jul 28, 2008 12:53 PM:
kelsograd wrote on Jul 28, 2008 1:33 PM:
Atrucker wrote on Jul 28, 2008 11:01 PM:
What and where . Okay once more .
Sunday lake is a small warm water fishery, bass blue gill, catfish some hold over trout , and perch. It can be very good at times , also no outboards here .
Big lake in Skagit County, has a reputation for large mouth bass, big perch, and searun cutts that show up in the lake about now . If these lakes do not produce , one in the area will . "
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