Visiting the Coca-Cola Bottling Plant, Indianapolis
Liz and I headed to Indy a little later than we expected. This past week has been a little hectic, so we left one day later than we had planned, catching our breath a little before heading home.
On arriving in Indy, we met up with my sister and my cousin Jenny. We, along with her husband Dan, all toured the Indianapolis Coca-Cola bottling plant (she works for Coke). This is us at the entrance, about to get our visitor badges and tour.
Me, complying with the rules.
The hairnet, from the side.
The first of many large stacks of Coca-Cola products.
Another large stack of Coke. Sadly, we saw some pretty spectacular machines and automated processes… but I wasn’t allowed to photograph any of it. For a while, it was just like those video interstitials from Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, where you got to see all the behind-the-scenes stuff at factories.
This tour was exactly like that.
Sadly, you’ll just have to take my word for it that there were some pretty spectacular, neat machines. For a good while there, I was bummed that I couldn’t record/share all the neat machinery at work.
A ton of blank/empty green 2-liter bottles.
Empty crates and palettes.
A pretty huge recycling area.
Closeup of one of the bales.
Near the entryway/exit.
i find it interesting that there were only coke products in the recycling area.
nickd (August 4, 2008 at 7:45 am)Felix correct me if i’m wrong, but I think it’s only this plant’s recycling, hence all of the coke products. They don’t take in any recycling from outside locations. (And they only recycling aluminum with 60% efficiency, which is the highest efficiency possible by our industry standards.)
Liz (August 4, 2008 at 11:57 am)Yeah, I think the recycling was specific to the plant or something along those lines. It wasn’t like this was an open recycling area for ALL aluminum… it was specific to Coke products.You should have seen the actual production machines and lines, where they were making all the various cans of Coke. I lost most of the details/numbers, but one stat I recall was that their machines kicked out something ridiculous like 60 cases of Coke per minute.They go through a lot of aluminum here, so it’s good they have recycling.
avoision (August 5, 2008 at 7:36 am)I saw your reply and thought you may be able to give me some advice.
I would like to help raise funds for our local Habitat for Humanity. We are close enough to the Indianapolis Bottleing Plant that we could drive there to collect sugar that was lost in the bottleing process and no longer qualifies for human consumption. I would like to collect and repackage it and then sell it through our Habitat Restore for use as hummingbird food. I know of this ‘surplus’ because a lady who works at the plant brings large amounts of this white granular sugar to a honey farm near here because she hates to see it go to a landfill.
How do you think would be the best way to approach the Indianapolis Plant? Would I need to find the operations mgr. contatct information? Is this a vialble possibility?
Rex Maddy (September 18, 2013 at 10:56 am)Rex Maddy
Sent you an email, Rex!
avoision (September 18, 2013 at 8:37 pm)The “slow” machine filled 600 bottles (20 fl. oz. size) of coke every minute.
liz (August 5, 2008 at 2:21 pm)I work at the Roanoke Production Facility. The bottling procedure is definately extraordinary the first time you experience it. From the Depalitizers (take off new, empty bottles to feed to the filler room to get cleaned and filled), to the Fillers (2Ltr’s run about 350 bottles per minute, 12oz cans run about 1600+ per minute), to the warmer (coke is filled at about 37*F, and needs to be warmed to room temp after exiting the filler), to the labelers, and finally the palletizer. The palletizer is a machine about the size of a semi, which gets fed cases of drinks, and organizes them into layers and automatically stacks them on a pallet…ready to load on a truck. I ran this machine for a year and every day was exciting!
KM (August 8, 2010 at 3:17 am)