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.
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.
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.