If you crack open a bottle of something - be it wine, water or soft drinks - over the festive season, there's a good chance the glass came from the Encirc factory in Cheshire. Here, on the banks of the River Mersey, you will find one of the world's largest glass factories. They take sand from Norfolk, soda ash created from the salt sitting beneath the Cheshire countryside and a lot of recycled glass and throw it into two of the biggest glass furnaces in the world. There, in the furnace, at temperatures of around 1,600 degrees centigrade, the sand melts and becomes a liquid river of molten glass. It is a chemical reaction humans…
