Timeline of Plastic Use

In My Humble Opinion
1

As a baby-boomer who grew up in the 60s, my memory is that almost none of the products commonly made of plastic were such back then. I’m very curious for factual information about when manufacturers began using this versatile material. I’ll give several examples based on my very weak memory:

Soda (aka Pop): My memory was that the standard supermarket bottle was 28 ounces, and made of glass, until around the late 70s, when the two-liter plastic took over.

Ketchup bottles: Growing up, all ketchup was sold in glass bottles, which made it very difficult to shake it out of the bottle. Some manufacturers (IIRC Heinz) even advertised how their ketchup was so thick, that it was worth the wait. Many restaurants served their ketchup in opaque red plastic squeeze bottles, but I suspect that the quality of the plastic wasn’t good enough to sell the ketchup in them. I really don’t remember when they switched to the same plastic as used for the soda bottles.

Toothpaste came in metal tubes that would crack and leak. No idea when they switched to the plastic used nowadays.

Shampoo: It scares me to think that we brought glass bottles into the shower, but that’s my memory. I do remember Prell Concentrate being an exception; it was in clear plastic tubes shaped very much like a toothpaste tube.

Toys and all sorts of household goods were made of metal or wood, not the ubiquitous plastic of today.

Shopping bags: My recollection is that the currently-being-phased-out bags started in the early 1980s. I remember detesting them at first, because they didn’t hold as much as the paper bags that they replaced. But I soon learned that the handles made it possible to carry several at a time, and they were certainly better than paper when the contents were wet.

Snack foods: Potato chips were in cellophane bags as long as I can remember, but I’ve heard that they were originally in paper bags. Drake’s Yodels and Ring Dings were individually wrapped in extremely thin foil, and then packaged two per cellophane pack, or a bunch per paper box. No foil nowadays, perhaps because the outer container does a better job of preserving the freshness?

Milk: As a young child, quarts were in glass bottles, and the half-pints served in school were waxed paper cartons. And it was literally waxed paper; I remember scraping wax off with my fingernail. But at some point it all switched to the plastic-coated paper still used today.

Raingear might be one of the best examples of problems that couldn’t be solved before plastic. They tried to waterproof umbrellas by using fabric with a very tight weave. But although it did keep most of the rain out, they were never as leakproof as today’s. Children wore raincoats that were coated with this very stiff bright yellow stuff, but it was not very flexible, and never caught on with the adults, at least the way I remember it.

What are YOUR memories? And importantly, to keep this in the “Factual Questions” category, do you remember (or better, can you document) when an industry or product switched to plastic?

2

Fountain pens were made of hard rubber early on, which is a very practical and durable substance in most ways but it had the unfortunate tendency to fade in sunlight. The color choice was also limited. In the 1920’s plastic, in the form of celluloid, started to be used; use of camphor-based celluloid persisted long after more practical materials were available for pens, due to the beautiful materials made from it. A few pens also tried to use Bakelite in the 1920’s, but for the thinness necessary for fountain pens, it tended to be somewhat brittle. Resin-type plastics started to be used after WWII. By the 1950’s most fountain pens were made either of metal or plastic, or a combination of the two; hard rubber had long since (you might say) faded away, although ebonite is still a material popular with collectors.

I don’t remember any of this, not being quite that old yet, but I have learned these things from my fountain pen hobby.

3

Along the hobby lines, but even more esoteric: airgun piston seals were made exclusively out of leather until the mid-1950’s, when the first synthetic seals were introduced. However, the early plastics used there would chemically disintegrate with time, leading to nasty surprises.

Leather piston seals remained in ever-dwindling use until the mid-1970’s, when the much-improved synthetics became the dominant, practically only material used. These days you’ll only find a leather seal on an antique airgun.

This niche example might be interesting in how it mirrors the switch to plastics on a larger scale.

4

Soda: I still remember the old glass Coca Cola 6 oz. bottles that you returned in a rack next to the vending machine. The bottles had the location of origin molded into the bottom. Local soda vendors (we actually had companies in my small home town who made and bottled soda) used glass bottles with metal crimp bottle caps that had cork inside.

Of course, we had canned soda, too. Steel cans at first, replaced by aluminum that gradually got thinner, with a variety of different hand-openable tops.

Transition to plastic took two stages. At first there were glass bottles with somewhat puffy “jackets” of plastic wrapped around to both insulate and prevent breakage (1980s into the 1990s). Then there was a two-part plastic bottle – PET on top and a PE base so it could stand upright. Then they came up with the all-PET bottle with a pentagonal base (1990s).

Ketchup – Glass in the 1960s and 1970s that transitioned to various plastic bottles

Toothpaste – metal tubes in the 1960s and 1970s, but changed to plastic after that.

Shampoo – I think there were glass bottles, but I also think that shampoo was one of the first products to shift to plastic for safety reasons. I’m pretty sure we had plastic bottles by the 1970s

Toys – very complicated. I know that there were plastic toys by the 1950s. I’ve seen pictures on websites, and I played with my older cousins’ plastic toys. By the 1960s plastic had become the dominant toy material, although there were some odd holdouts. Fisher0-Price still made wooden baby toys. A lot of toys I had were made of ben tin (!). They had tabs that folded over to “clamshell” halves together, and which you could cut yourself on, if you weren’t careful. Sparkling “ray guns” were made out of these, but also a Mr. Magoo car that I had. We also had some metal toys (a toy barn, a fort) mad out of some other metal – steel, I think. Of course, Lincoln Logs and Tinker Toys were wood, and Erector sets (Meccano to you Brits) were all metal, but I also had a lot of construction toys made of plastic elements, including a set of proto-lego building blocks. (1960s)

Shopping bags – paper. I recall seeing my first plastic bag in the mid-1970s.

Snack foods – cardboard boxes. Hershey bars and gum were wrapped in paper-covered foil, with a wrapper over the front (you could peel off the paper and use the thin foil for electrostatic experiments). Bonomo Turkish Taffy came in aluminum foil with one side printed, and if it stuck in hot weather you could bite down on the metal and get a nasty shock. But early on a lot of candy started being sold in plastic bags.

Milk – We got glass bottles from the dairy, but in the supermarkets you got waxed paper cartons that were perfect rectangular solids, with a hole near the corner of one end that had a crimped waxed paper disc sealing it. When you were finished with the milk you could wash the carton out and use it to make building blocks. The little half-pint contains they sold in our school vending machine were miniature versions of these. That lasted until the mid-1960s. They they canged the cartons so that the tops were made in a tent form that you had to carefully prise open to make a spout. They did the same with our half-pint containers, too. Shortly afterwards they changed the coating from wax to plastic. Then they started putting on plastic spouts in the 1970s.

Raingear – we used the bright yellow heavy cloth coated with something raincoats, too. In Boy Scouts we had ponchos that were made of the same stuff, but green. We also had heavy rubber galoshes that were like ski boots to put on, with snaps all the way up. I really liked it when gum rubber Totes came out in the 1970s – you just stretched them over your shoes. Now they sem to be gone, and I miss them.

5

Halloween masks were made of that thin, stiff plastic. But I had a Mickey Mouse mask when I was little that came from prehistoric times. It was made of cloth that had been stiffened with starch and painted. I wore it in a rainstorm and it melted on my face as the starch washed away.

6

Ahhh… memories of Bakelite®… the most brittle plastic I’ve ever seen. I remember it being used extensively for electrical outlets.

7

[Moderating]
Since this is asking for personal memories, as opposed to, say, a timeline of when different types of plastic were invented, it’s probably better suited for IMHO. Moving.

8

It was also used for those black knobs at the user end of electric switches.

9

This thread reminded me of when I temped at the HQ of a worldwide membership organization ~30 years ago:

10

Thereby throwing in the trash all the Boy Scout tips about using waxed cardboard as a firestarter.

I remember that “TV” dinners came in aluminum trays at least into the 1970s before the switch to microwavable plastic.

11

Buck McCoy" “Well, back in my day, we had a thing called metal.”
Bart: “Metaaal.”

That’s referencing a lunch box. I think the switch there came in the 70s.

I had a lot of toys made of metal A few made from rubber. Now so much is plastic and is crap.

12

ChapStick came in a metal tube (including the metal cap). If you carried it in your pocket, the printed-on label with logo and ingredients and all that would wear off and you’d end up with a shiny anonymous metal tube by the time you were at the end of it.

Aspirin came in glass bottles but also in little travel-sized flat metal single-layer containers that, in order to open them, you’d squeeze the back corners. Often the metal would bend and distort before you’d consumed all the aspirins and you’d have to cuss and pinch and perhaps insert a nail file or knife blade to get the thing to open.

Library cards were usually heavy cardboard stock with a little metal piece attached on one corner that would contain your patron ID embossed so that when checking out books it would record that number along with the date (from an inkpad date stamp).

Flashlights were metal.

ETA: Ooh, can’t leave out ice cube trays! Ice cube trays were metal, and they had a lever that you’d have to pull that would flex the little dividers and, ideally, break the ice cubes loose. Then you’d lift the entire inside contraption (the lever plus the array of dividers) up and out of the tray and then you could dump the ice into the bucket. These devices would bend and warp and become balky; sometimes you could yank the lever all the way back and it would not budge the dividers and you’d have to bang the whole assembly on the counter in hopes of loosening the ice.

13

Which switch? Because plastic lunchboxes are just as rare now: Far more common are lunch bags.

Which I suppose are mostly still made of synthetic materials, but nobody ever seems to call synthetic-fiber cloth “plastic”.

14

As for toys…is 1948 early enough?

15

Dry erase markers came in metal pen bodies instead of the plastic they come in now. I’ve got a few that I salvaged out of old desks before they were thrown away. Surprisingly, a few of them still write well. They have that old xylene smell that was still being used in my childhood even after the switch to plastic made.

16

Last year I visited the “Glass Beach” in Fort Bragg, California. The beach was once used as a garbage dump until 1967 (apparently that wasn’t uncommon in coastal towns in the first half of the 20th century). When the beach was eventually cleaned up the metal items were removed and sold as scrap, biodegradable items simply degraded, and the glass got ground down by the surf into the rather pretty glass pebbles that are there today. And as a 21st century guy for a second I though “What happened to the plastic? Oh right, disposable plastic wasn’t a thing when the dump was active.”

ETA:

I was born in 1980, and I remember ketchup still being sold in glass bottles during my childhood. In fact, I remember one of the ketchup brands, probably Heinz, advertising their new plastic squeeze bottle. No more waiting! I guess that was probably late 1980s.

17

I think I still have a few of the original glass Zip-Lock freezer bags somewhere.

18

Here’s some more timeline for a now widely-used plastic:
Nylon - Wikipedia.

19

I remember these in the counter of our local “5 & 10” store. Little trucks and airplanes with friction motors. If you bent the tabs back and took them apart, the unseen side of the sheet metal was usually something like an orange-juice can with Japanese characters. I think that the tinplate printers would use their overruns or defective printed materials for toys.

20

Yeah. I used to use a screwdriver to bend the tabs back and disassemble my toys, too. A budding engineer, I was.