The cost of returning containers whole, washing, inspecting, rejecting breakages outweighs the benefits.

It would be much more efficient to use extremely lightweight containers that can be crushed in a reverse vending machine in any supermarket.

That's how returnable bottles and cans work here in Norway (and several other European and Scandinavian countries). At the moment it only covers drinks containers but that is probably because they are the only ones that pose a major littering problem.

See https://www.tomra.com/en/collection/reverse-vending

This way the energy cost of returning the containers is minimised and the returned material is suitable for immediate, industrial scale, automated recycling.

But of course that doesn't allow the producer to use just any container so it limits their branding opportunities.

Edit: removed repeated link.