Glass has always seemed a bit too classy and le rich to me. Its heavyweight and material usage always ticks me off. Recycled plastic is quite better, metal containers even better.
In germany we have glass bottles that are reused, you pay a per bottle deposit (0,08€, non-reusable is 0,25€) and get it back when you bring the bottle back to the market. The market will send the bottle back to the company it came from and they will clean it and reuse it for bottling again if it’s still good.
There is also reuse for plastic bottles, but it is less common, at least everywhere I lived. (reuse is done regionally) Also they can’t be reused as often as glass bottles. One could reuse metal containers, but that isn’t done. I’d guess because they aren’t transparent and so cannot be inspected by bottling systems as easily.
Soft-drinks usually aren’t reusable, because they aren’t distributed locally.
But then you could make like 5-10 plastic bottles per glass bottle, as far as the entire recycling and production cost goes.
