Glass milk bottle
From the second half of the 19th century, milk has been packaged and delivered in reusable and returnable glass bottles.
In 1878, George Henry Lester patented the first glass jar intended to hold milk.
[3] [failed verification] Following this, the next earliest patent was for a milk bottle with a dome style tin cap and was granted on September 23, 1884, to Whiteman's brother, Abram V.
[4] The Whiteman brothers produced milk bottles based on these specifications at the Warren Glass Works Company in Cumberland, Maryland, and sold them through their New York sales office.
These include a pop bottle type with a wire clamp, used by the Chicago Sterilized Milk Company, Sweet Clover, and others.
Fruit jars were also used, but only the Cohansey Glass Manufacturing plant made them with dairy names embossed.
By the 1920s, glass milk bottles had become the norm in the UK after slowly being introduced from the US before World War I.
[5] During the Second World War misuse or hoarding of milk bottles was made illegal in the United Kingdom.
[6] From the 1960s onward in the United States, with improvements in shipping and storage materials, glass bottles have almost completely been replaced with either LDPE coated paper cartons or recyclable HDPE plastic containers (such as square milk jugs), depending on the brand.
Because of this, the use of glass bottles in local or regional, non-industrial milk distribution has become an increasingly common sight.
Milk which is sold in returnable containers, such as glass bottles, are not required to be labelled in metric units.
The glass milk bottles are sold in supermarkets, convenience stores and in small restaurants.
They were the most common form of packaging for school milk in the early 1970s, but have been gradually superseded by third pint cartons and plastic bottles.
Leicester, South Tyneside,[15] Leeds, and Kirklees[16] were the last local authorities where school milk was supplied in third of a pint glass bottles until the dairies ceased using them in 2007.
