“Please return empty Coca-Cola bottles to your dealer.”

This 1944 Coca-Cola newspaper ad points at one of the company’s biggest requirements of the war years: Recycling bottles so that Coca-Cola could keep flowing. Rather than invest in making new bottles, the goal was to keep the glass bottles on an endless cycle of selling and then re-selling the same glass bottles as many times as possible. That’s not the way it works these days, and I am now left asking: Why did we get so far away from the old glass bottles?