Greenhouse building materials like steel and aluminum are getting more expensive on top of the glass, which is also experienced a significant price increase from autumn of 2020. However, it has slowly returned to the almost normal price it had in the summer of 2021.
"Besides the price increase of all kinds of materials, I believe the shipping cost increase is the largest one among all the prices. At least, the shipping cost of glass has been higher than the value of glass itself in the past months for North American projects. It is going better now, but the increase in shipping is still one of the highest parts of the entire cost," Chris, the person from PLANTI, said.
"Compared with diffuse glass, the price increase of clear glass is much more significant. Especially low iron clear glass, its price is more than 10% higher than low iron diffuse glass now. While it used to be cheaper than low iron diffuse glass before the Covid," Chris said.
"We provide various glass solutions. For some projects that prefer low iron clear glass, growers can choose low iron diffuse glass. We provide super low haze glass, like 10% haze which looks almost as transparent as clear glass. Besides, it performs very high transmittance, no lower than low iron clear glass. We have supplied three projects, one to Japan and the other two to North America. Growers required low iron clear glass in the beginning but finally had PLANTI low iron super low haze glass on the roof price-wise. I'm so happy to announce that we just signed a new project last week that requires this 10% haze glass."
"If we talk about the European market, there are some differences. As we all know that there are quite high taxes for low iron glass exported to EU countries from China, and it stopped a lot of projects to have Chinese glass on the roof. While some times, the delivery time is too long to buy glass from other areas. How to solve this contradiction? PLANTI has launched a special product that suits the European market. It is 90%+ transmittance clear glass which will be exempted from anti-duties. Due to its special transmittance, there isn't always a production schedule. Normally we produce this type of glass every several months. In the past July, we have just produced 300 thousand square meters of this special glass."
In addition to the above special glass, PLANTI also provides various other types of glass used in greenhouse building. Like the white coated glass, we have improved our facility to produce white glass inside the dust-free workshop to make sure the coating process is without any defects.
"Except these, our clear glass with protective film suits for small research-based greenhouses to better protect people and crops. We also provide tinted glass with gray color, blue color, etc., these are not regularly used greenhouse glass and are only for some part of the house, but you can get them all from PLANTI, let alone the regular used diffuse and AR coated roof glass," Chris added.
For more information:
Planti Inc.
info@plantiinc.com
www.plantiinc.com