Do you know where cups and saucers are made?

I've never given much thought to the things I eat my food from. But today I got to see how the plates and cups we use everyday are made. The company I visited makes them for some of the big home furnishing names of the world, judging by the inspection area names I saw today.

A 2.5 hour drive down an often crowded and poorly made road out of Dhaka took me to the wonderful factory that belongs to a man I met yesterday. This is the fascinating side of my job. He's the director of his family business which is 3 generations old, and employs over a 1000 people on this site. We sat and chatted in the back of the Mitsubishi Pajero taking us there (sounded like it had a V8 and was a 5speed manual for those who know about these things). On the way he told me what a fantastic job the military government in Bangladesh is doing. He was concerned that after the elections in December there would be a return to corruption in politics. I just listened.

I had no idea what to expect of a porcelain factory and when I got there, it wasn't really what I thought it might look like.



It was a huge open warehouse type room with high ceilings and open walls. 2 enormous kilns run almost the length of the room with conveyor belts running through them. Huge shiny pipes take the heat away for use in the drying system both underground and overhead. Very little to be seen really. The whole lot is powered by natural gas. Apparently Bangladesh has huge natural gas reserves only just under the surface, and its very clean burning which is what you need for bright white porcelain. You'd expect it to be hot in there, but it was cooler there than outside due to the building design which allows the air to flow freely.



Looking down the conveyor belts I could see the glow further down where at 800C the items are baked (is that the right term?)

Did you know this is what your cups and saucers are made of? Neither did I.






The crystals are crushed eventually to powder in several stages and mixed with the feltspar stone and china clay in various proportions to make different types of product. This is then put into big drums and churned and churned with water to make a liquid clay.



This is then squeezed dry in huge squeezy things which create enormous discs of clay.




These are passed through something which extracts lead and cadmium somehow and then turned into large sausage type tubular sections of clay.



People then cut them into smaller disks, put them in a mould and a machine turns them into a cup. Amazing.



They then enter a drier, and then get checked and cleaned and smoothed before going into a furnace.



Then they are glazed and furnaced again.



Inspected for quality and put back through the procesess if anything is not quite right.



Even the rejects get sold. Nothing is wasted. I was given a set of 6 mugs to bring home. Very nice. I now know exactly how and where they were made.