Where have all the pop bottles gone?  The brown glass Ginger Beer bottles, the clear glass bottles of fizzy lemonade that really tasted of lemons. The greenish glass Coke bottles of REAL Coke and where is the Dandelion and Burdock?  We lament their passing.
Remember the days when fizzy pop was a real treat and if you were lucky you were sent to the corner shop to buy it for Sunday lunch. 

It’s all so commonplace now, kids stroll down the street with a can of Coke or 7up, Fanta or Sprite every day and often more than once a day. 
Pop bottles were once a source of income for those with little or no money, when you would get 6d back on a bottle, or maybe a nickel or a dime or a penny in the US. We used to see them in the old movies where kids picked them up on the streets with their carts or bikes and took them back to their local store for pocket money.  What a great way of recycling and how well it could be used now.  It is exactly the sort of altruistic initiative that the giant pop producers like Coca Cola and Pepsi should reintroduce to the world to make recycling worthwhile for everyone.  It would surely save some of the world’s resources (and parent’s pocket money)

Mineral water originated in the hot, natural springs where bathing and drinking of the waters was promoted for health reasons. Scientists soon discovered that the gas Carbon dioxide was responsible for the naturally occurring bubbles.

Fizzy pop started life in 1767 in the hands of one Joseph Priestly an Englishman who first discovered a way of infusing water with the carbon dioxide producing carbonated water, first known as soda water. John Mervin Nooth improved upon Priestly’s design and produced an apparatus which he sold to pharmacies for commercial use. The first Soda fountains in the US in the early 1800’s used Nooth’s apparatus and soon factories were being built to produce these hugely successful fountains. Flavourings, fruit extracts, sarsaparilla and birch bark were added to the original soda water to make them more attractive to customers and sales rocketed.

Pop bottles
Originally pop bottles started out made of glazed earthenware ceramic with the names of the company printed on the side in dark blue or brown lettering. They had glass balls permanently in place as the stopper in the top of the bottle. These are now antique items and some of the rarer ones sell for quite reasonable sums of money. Later hand-blown glass bottles were used until the invention of a bottle blowing machine in 1899 by Michael Owens which hugely increased production.

These pop bottles had to have a means of stopping the carbon dioxide gas of the fizzy pop from escaping and in the early days of the bottling industry as many as 1500 patents were applied for to the US Patents office for either a cap, lid or cork. Corks were the most popular bottle stoppers until 1900 and of course are still used today by wine makers worldwide, though a shortage of cork is leading gradually to the use of plastic stoppers.

In America in 1892 the Crown style bottle tops (with cork liner) that we see on beer bottles nowadays were patented but were being used in Europe earlier than this, though the tops were still tied on with a wire under the lip of the bottle. The crown style bottle top (with plastic liner) are still popular for many types of drink bottle and are extremely collectable with thousands of different colours and designs.

The downside of pop
Many people are of the opinion that soft drinks contribute greatly to the epidemic of childhood and adult obesity, type 2 diabetes and tooth decay and therefore should be banned from school vending machines and school shops. They argue the case that schools should be caring for the health of the children they are educating and that allowing these drinks to be sold in school leads children to the belief that these drinks may be consumed safely in moderate or even large quantities without consequence.

Fizzy drinks are increasingly linked to all kinds of problems, from not sleeping in children, pancreatic cancer, liver damage, excess weight gain, irritability and diarrhoea. Diet drinks however do not carry the same risk as they don’t contain sugar but artificial sweeteners.

Natural sources
The trend seems to be that ‘natural’ is the way to go. Home-made pop is on the way up, made from natural ingredients using pure organic sugars and herbs and fruit grown organically. Elderflower cordial, blackberry cordial, rosehip syrup all use the fruits of the countryside and gathered in a quiet location provide wonderful flavours for your new, natural pop bottles just add sparkling water for the fizz.