Timeline of Plastic Use

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@Keeve

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.

ISTR them being full 32 oz quarts, and sold in paper six-packs. You could return them for a deposit. This went out sometime in the late 70s-early 80s with the advent of the plastic 2 liter bottle.

@Keeve

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 bottle

That’s been much more recently- probably within the past 10 years when the old glass Heinz bottles finally vanished. I suspect in large part that was driven by restaurants using them, and being able to easily consolidate several partial bottles with the relatively wide mouths of the glass bottles.

@Keeve

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

As far as I can tell, they just started laminating the foil- no idea when it became predominantly plastic though, but it’s been very recently- last 5-10 years at most.

@Keeve

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.

Shampoo has been in plastic bottles since at least the mid-late 1970s.

@Keeve

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.

Far back as I can remember, we always had plastic milk gallon jugs. You can still get paper cartons if you look around- in my recent hospital stint, I got little 4 oz paper cartons of milk.