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Surprised the Crying Indian American TV ad isn't in here. I have a giggle when I see someone on here outraged that they saw someone toss trash out their car window. That was SOP until the Crying Indian. I can't think of a PSA in my lifetime that made such a dramatic impact.
While not a piece of media exactly, reporting on the Tylenol Murders changed packaging almost overnight. Used to be you could pull anything off the shelf, open it and close it, no one would be the wiser. I remember as a kid suddenly encountering all the things suddenly having tamper-proof packaging. It was truly wild to my young brain.
Fun fact: the guy who portrayed the native guy in those ads, Iron Eyes Cody, was Sicilian.
Crying Indian is such an interesting nugget of history. Paid for by the plastics lobby who saw the writing on the wall of getting regulated for excessive trash. This same plastics lobby also coined the term "litter bug" and tried to get the world to forget that bottled drinks were sold in reusable bottles that would be deposited, washed, refilled and resealed. But also like you said, the standard procedure was to just toss your trash outside and not worry about it before this campaign, in part because nearly all packaging was biodegradable if not completely reusable until about a generation before this ad campaign (the Ford model T literally came with instructions to reuse the crate it shipped in to make the truck bed for example)
In the era of the model t, everything was hard to make and thus expensive. I can very much imagine that that crate it came in wasn't cheap, so reuse only makes sense.
In today's age everything is so dirt cheap that packaging is just automatic pretty garbage. I'm still waiting for laws to prohibit double, triple, or even quadruple packaging at least. That tube of tooth paste really doesn't need a carton box around it, and the tube itself could be aluminum again so that the entire damned thing can be recycled, but yeah, plastics are cheaper so here we are.
You put it way better than I did about packaging before plastics! There's so many fascinating examples of things being reused back in the day because of the cost that would never happen today, and will need to start happening again if we want to avoid a societal level catastrophie