Bottles hold many kinds of liquid substances including milk, soda, motor oil and shampoo, as well as a wide range of dry products such as medicine, vitamins and nutritional supplements. Bottles can also be made from a variety of different materials, the most common being glass and plastic. Plastic bottles are often made of high-density polyethylene (HDPE), low-density polyethylene (LDPE) and polyvinyl chloride (PVC or vinyl).
A bottle is a container that is designed to be sealed and capped for holding a substance such as a beverage, pharmaceutical, chemical or cosmetic product. The bottle will typically have a handle for holding and lifting it, and a lip or neck that can be screwed or snapped to seal the contents. The cap can be made of either metal or a softer, pliable material such as plastic or rubber. The cap can be affixed to the bottle by means of a threaded fastener such as a screw or snapping closure, or it may be molded directly onto the bottle itself.
Glass is a unique substance that cannot be defined in terms of the physical characteristics of other materials like steel or wood. It is a disordered, amorphous solid rather than a crystalline one and the composition of glass can vary tremendously with new workable glass compositions being developed almost daily.
Various materials can be used to make glass, and the specific composition of a particular type of glass is influenced by the region in which it is made and the desired end use. For example, sand used to make glass bottles contains some iron, which, if not removed, produces a green color in the resulting container. During the manufacturing process, this impurity can be reduced to very low levels using chemicals such as selenium oxide and arsenic trioxide.
Once a raw bottlemaking formulation is found that produces the desired results, it can be formed into a bottle through a process known as blow molding. A parison, which is a slightly inflated gob of glass, is placed into a bottle blow mold and compressed air is applied to inflate it into the final shape of the bottle. The bottles are then trimmed of excess material and inspected for quality control.
There is a lot of terminology related to bottles that can be hard to understand for the novice. This is especially true when dealing with bottle collector jargon that tends to be descriptive but difficult to visualize (click on the glossary link for a definition of dimple, for instance). To help the reader understand these terms more easily, we have included a pop-up page dedicated to describing the basic bottle morphology and terminology. This “bottle basics” page can be closed by clicking on the X in the upper right corner when finished.
