A rarity? Oil in glass bottles

When did oil start to be ubiquitously sold in plastic bottles? I’m not talking about vegetable or sunflower oil as I can’t remember a time when that didn’t come in plastic bottles but I’m talking about ‘speciality’ oils such as olive oil and rapeseed oil. Now I don’t see these as ‘speciality’ oils as I use them everyday in cooking and baking and there was a time, not that long ago, that they always came in glass bottles. But now the plastic bottle is commonplace and switches are sprung on you suddenly (I’m looking at you Tesco who recently started selling sesame oil in a plastic bottle instead of a glass bottle).

So I went on a hunt for olive oil and rapeseed oil in glass bottles. A fairly easy feat you say, but I needed to buy them from places that were easily accessible to me on a regular basis and importantly didn’t cost significantly more than the oil I was previously buying.

I found both types of oil in glass bottles in Lidl, a shop which we can visit easily as it is on our route home from swimming lessons. The olive oil was the Filippo Berio brand but was half the price than in the other supermarkets. I bought two. The rapeseed oil was a Lidl branded cold pressed one.

Now I’m under no illusion that this packaging is completely plastic free. The Lidl bottle had a plastic wrap around the lid and both bottles have a plastic pouring widget inside the neck. (A further list of ‘sneaky’ plastic can be found on the very useful Plastic is Rubbish blog). However, this is a lot less plastic than a whole plastic bottle and is the best solution I can find at the moment as we seem to lack an oil refill place in our county.

What I haven’t been able to find is olive oil or rapeseed in a non-plastic container larger than 500ml. A larger container = less packaging overall. I’m planning to look in the French supermarket when we go on holiday in the summer. I’m pretty sure that the olive oil I’ve seen there has been in glass bottles or tins.