I grew up in Toledo, Ohio, so I found this article from yesterday's Wall Street Journal interesting.
The point of the article is the irony that Toledo - nicknamed "The Glass Capital of the World" since it provided glass to the auto industry - needed to import the glass for its new glass museum from China.
Here's an excerpt:
It was a similar story for the Toledo Museum of Art. Only a Chinese company and Spanish and Italian companies could produce the oversize curving panels needed for the futuristic design of its Glass Pavilion. Sanxin says it was paid under $1 million; people involved in the project said it would have cost up to 50% more in Europe.
"We did get some grief about the fabrication until we explained we didn't have a choice," says Carol Bintz, an officer of the Toledo Museum of Art who led the project. "We couldn't find anyone in the United States that could do both the size and make the curvature."
Toledo is now in the midst of struggling to reinvent itself, and to move away from its dependence on the auto industry, but it's difficult. A number of other states are also trying to move towards new technologies to create jobs for it citizens, so in some ways it has become a bidding war in attracting business.But it's doubtful that Toledo will ever again be a "glass capital". The article describes what China's glass capital looks like; I doubt most American would like this type of industry in their cities:
China's "Glass City" features a skyline of concrete cooling towers characteristic of nuclear power plants, not the expensive equipment Western glassmakers use to reduce pollutants like nitrogen oxide. Mr. Liu says 10% of his capital expenditure goes into pollution controls, that he meets all national standards and is switching to cleaner natural gas.
But Mr. Liu's plant features construction that looks slapdash by Western standards. It is run by engineers seated on wooden benches. A nearby silica sand producer spits mucky water onto the parched land. And trucks ply Shahe roads loaded with bags of synthetic soda ash, the product of a chemical process environmentalists forced out of the U.S. in 1985.
Most of China's glass output is such low quality, it has no market other than China. And much of the Chinese glass now hitting U.S. shores is chiseling into market extremities where profit margins are thinnest: the cheapest salt shakers, table tops and replacement windshields.
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