Superfest – The almost unbreakable East German Glass (2021)

Most people involved in such projects were far from what you can call communists, not involved with regine, not members of the party (or if they were it was just to be allowed certain positions in the system, literal ticking checkbox on the requirements list), some even secretly hating it and conspiring against it. This reductionism is unnecessary and outright incorrect.

One can claim it was invented in communist East Germany (although the official name was literally German democratic republic), and thats about it.

You also slap 'invented by american capitalists' onto every single invention coming out of US of past 250 years?

And that's nonsense. The real problem was the reunification and the collapse of the East German economy. The East Germans got rid of their government, peacefully and the result was the unification of a protected plan economy to an open social market system (West Germany did not and still does not have US style capitalism -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_market_economy ). The East German market was not having access to current technologies and raw materials (for example due to the lack of money to buy on the world market). The companies in the east were not competitive and they lost their protecting system.

There were LOTS of glass manufacturers, both in West Germany and in the surrounding countries. Those were eager to take the market and a small and expensive glass production was an easy victim. There are lots of examples where GDR products were replaced by Western products, which were much more efficient in production and distribution.

It has very little to do with "capitalism", just that there was a much larger and more efficient market around, eager to take over. The "communist" economy wasn't communist and it was behind a self-built "protective" wall. When the wall collapsed and the system which protected the wall collapsed (-> the whole eastern Europe incl. the former Soviet Union largely collapsed), then during reunification of East and West Germany, the East German economy also collapsed (products were no longer competitive, lost their markets, etc.). The West German companies did not have the time to protect small scale producers, their problem was to deliver on the expectations of the East Germans: create same living standards, provide access to the larger market without scarce products.

For the East German population it was mostly clear, they wanted to buy western products, which for a long time were either not available or far too expensive or both. East German brands were out of fashion.

The attraction of the West German economy and political system, together with the failure of the East German system (and its soviet-influenced model), caused the collapse of the political and economic system of the GDR.

Later the "Ostalgie" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostalgie ) made people aware that there was also a loss: familiar brands were gone, familiar products were gone, jobs were gone, people were gone, (-> many went to West Germany to work there) western products were not always better, ...

TLDR; -> the company was a victim of the turmoil of the reunification and introduction of a larger&open economy.

Side note: that East Germans needed to take care of scarce products (see the cars which had long waiting lists) did not mean that the East German production was environmentally friendly. Just the opposite, East German production was as environmentally unfriendly or even more, as in the West. An environmental movement (like the Greens in West Germany) was not possible in the one-party-rules system of the GDR dictatorship. Later, a lot of production got closed(& sometimes replaced) because of old and dirty factories and production processes.

Side note 2: Germany now has a large scale "Mehrweg- und Pfandsystem" for bottles. This means that in any super market one can buy bottles of, say, beer and one pays a higher price. The markets are required to take back the empty bottles and pay the consumer the "Flaschenpfand" (bottle deposit). Bottles get reused a lot (50 times) and this system has 43% market share. One can imagine that lighter/more durable glass bottles might have an advantage in such a system. Currently we see either heavy glass bottles or lighter plastic bottles (reused 25 times).

corning the guys they bring up at the very end is also the company that did pyrex. they spun that business off in the 90s. They don't mention that because you'd recognize it and go "wait my cabinet's been full of that my whole life"