Sort of funny, because I remember in school we were taught "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" but maybe that simply doesn't work as a concept for most modern materials.
The reason they are getting traction is because at first glance it sounds like a great idea.
Only when you think about the detail that you start to realise that unintended consequences.
The question to really focus on is "why are environmentalists so obsessed with keeping plastic out of landfill?". Environmentalists will go to almost any length to keep plastic out of landfill. But WHY? The safest place for plastic waste is in landfill, not out in the environment distributed everywhere as microplastics.
In Australia there's a ridiculous utter obsession with "recycling plastic", as though it is some sort of solution to the plastic problem. Recycling plastic is not a solution because the flow of plastic is so utterly gargantuan that no amount of recycling can get on top of it. And that is when governments that are under pressure to do something about it turn to plastic roads. "What are we going to do with this firehose of waste plastic? Well we CANNOT put it in landfill because landfill is the worst thing in the world, so we must put it in roads."
Imho all single-use plastic (and similar non-recyclable non-biodegradable products like non-recyclable coated paper products) should be taxed by mass. Get rid of the stupid "plastic straw ban" and "plastic bag ban" piecemeal garbage that punishes consumers while ignoring commercial users and hit everybody equally.
I remember at one point we saw a demo of an alternative 2 litre pop (soda) bottle that used slightly thicker plastic which made it durable enough to be collected, washed, and refilled. It never came to market here, unfortunately. I guess no one was willing to put in the infrastructure.
The infrastructure isn't crazy and it's working nicely in plenty of countries.
Supermarket chains lure you into believing that all of the plastic from those bottles will be reused to create new ones.
This is kind of surprising. I remember when I was a kid (not that many decades ago), things like milk, soda, yogurt etc. would come in glass or ceramic bottles under a subscription service. [For context this wasn't in the US]
Every time the delivery day came, you would set out (sometimes a crate of) empty bottles that were then exchanged for the same amount of filled bottles. They'd then wash and sterilize the old bottles centrally and refill and recap for a future delivery.
Thing is, I don't recall buying drinks this way being more expensive per-bottle than what it costs today. Perhaps slightly more inconvenient since you had to remember to set out the old bottles, but it's not like people don't do that anyways today with their recycling...
So there are places in the world, where this is still possible, although there no longer is a delivery service. But it's more expensive than plastic bottles and even more expensive than single-use plastic, so the majority uses plastic alternatives. Most milk here comes in some kind of cardboard containers that are mixed with a lot of plastic.
Tetrapak?
IIRC they're a combo of paper, aluminum foil, and a plastic inner coating. Individually, the paper and aluminum are relatively easily recyclable, but I recall seeing somewhere that because it's all bound into a single material, the labor/energy cost to separate the layers of tetrapak for recycling end up not worth it and it just ends up in landfills...
I feel like people figured out how to do this in the past in a cost effective way (even including delivery!) but then we somehow moved away to something (arguably) worse.
My hypothesis here would be perhaps the increasing abundance of choice makes it inefficient, since the main drawback I recall was that there was just like 1-2 local providers that handled each type of thing rather than like the 4 brands of milk we get at supermarkets today [in the US]. Though, I can't see why modern supply chains couldn't be refitted to handle this? E.g. your package delivery person / mailman also recovers the reusable containers etc.