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Where Does Glass Come From?
Glass is generally not found naturally in the form we know as glass (unless you want to mine your local landfill). The basic raw material used to make glass is sand. The higher the silica content, the better. Sand is found all over the world, though some deposits are more pure than others. The less impurities there are in the sand, the more clear the resulting glass will be.
The green glass we see in wine bottles comes from sand with lots of iron in it, one of the more impure (and thus cheaper) varieties of sand. Window glass is made from slightly higher quality sand (still some iron; notice the green tint when you look at the edge of a piece of it). Optical glass (used in eyeglasses and microsopes) comes from a very pure (and very expensive) sand with almost no impurities.
Sand is combined with various other ingredients that enable it to be melted, and that influence its working properties. Certain chemicals are added to the sand to make the resulting glass clearer, or to make it have a longer or shorter working range. For instance, a glassblower wants a glass that can be reheated and manipulated for a long time, while glass used in a bottle-making machine needs to set up fast so it can be removed from the mold right away.
Various colorant chemicals can be added as well. Selenium for yellow; copper for red (depending on how the temperature is handled in the processing); cobalt for blue, manganese for purple; chromium for green; and even gold for ruby or pink glass.
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