Worldwide television programme visits Gerresheimer facility

The German television programme Mouse TV visited Gerresheimer’s Essen production facility to find out why medicine bottles are made of brown glass.

Marion Stolzenwald has been Senior Manager Corporate Communication at Gerresheimer since 2011. One of her external communications responsibilities is to support TV crews. Here is a report on the filming of one of Germany's most famous children’s TV shows.

One of this year’s special events for me and my glass production colleagues in Essen was a visit from the famous German TV programme, Mouse TV.

It is a children’s format that delivers a mix of fun and educational stories. The programmes are aired in around 100 countries around the world. Many parents watch them with their children. Mouse TV is famous for explaining complex subjects in such a simple way that children can understand them without a problem.

The mouse visited us to find out why cough medicine bottles are made of brown glass.

The educational feature on the brown glass cough medicine bottle compared its function to that of a pair of sunglasses.

You put on a pair of sunglasses to protect your eyes from UV light and the brown glass bottle is brown to protect the cough medicine against UV light. To make brown glass you need sand, lime and soda, plus sodium sulfate and iron oxide for the brown colour.

The seven-man TV crew had a challenging time filming the glass production process. They had 28 different motifs on their filming schedule.

Some of the special highlights included a peephole camera shot into the furnace, as well as shots of the top end of the production line to show how the molten glass gobs are fed into the molding machine.

The filming took around eight hours to complete and all stages in the production process were filmed, from delivery of the raw materials to the finished bottle and from the hot end to the cold end.

“When you only have one day to look over the production employees‘ shoulders, you feel a great sense of respect for the work that they put into what we perceive as a very simple product like a glass bottle,“ said Johannes Büchs after filming, adding that precision is another important ingredient of bottle making, in addition to sand, lime and soda.