When I was kid... 1936 1946
Yes.. a little different back in those days... A little before the introduction of plastics into general use, beginning in the 1950's... Before that, "bakelite".
FWIW, here's what it was like when I was very young.
First of all, there were only 130 million people inthe US. Disposables of anything other than paper bags were rare. Anything that would burn, went into the wire basket burner in the back yard. Almost all glass beverage bottle went back to the store. All metal... cans or metal of any kind, went to the war effort. Nothing made of metal was thrown away. Food can containers were washed out, both ends cut off, paper labels removed, and the cans were flattened.
Food waste was almost nil. What ever was left, went into the garbage pail. Nothing
ever that was not be used as animal food. We had a garbage man, who came weekly to the covered garbage container that hung from the corner of the garage, He had a leather cover on his front and back, and a large garbage bag to dump our garbage in (we called it "Swill"). His horse and buggy was filled and smelled, but only while he was stopped. The garbage was ground up and used to slop the pigs.
The result of this was that our "dump" was basically clean materials. It serviced our entire neighborhood (maybe 500 families). It was our source of wheels and things to build our go carts, guns and cannons. Playing "War" was the major kids game back then. . My mom accused the dump of being the source of my periodic impetigo, but I knew that wasn't true.
The salvage habits went far beyond that, because I remember going back after I was in college, and the dump was still in use, still not full, and yes everyone was still burning their trash, and the garbage man, by then, had a truck. By then, the U.S. Population was 200 million, and for the most part, there were still no two car families that I knew of. Only big change was from heating with coke (couldn't afford coal then)... to having an oil furnace.
Sheesh... I wonder how many of you knew that coke, was not Coca-Cola.