And let's call out recycling for the sham that it is. Recycling is a lie for plastics, plastics can not be economically recycled. They must be banned and the polluters made to internalize the externality.
Glass bottles are not perfect. They are lots heavier, which leads to transportation pollution. They also break and hurt people.
As to plastics - You are correct, they do not recycle and when you try to do it, even with a very low ratio of recycled to new plastics you end up with crappy weak plastic - think laundry baskets that have handles that break easily.
i think we should just learn to burn plastics - efficiently and cleanly.
Having said that glass bottles were a nightmare when I was a kid because of littering assholes who would toss them anywhere. Littering is less of an issue these days but I think going back to glass would need to both reward recycling and shame litter bugs. Walking home from the local swimming hole after slicing the bottom of your foot open is no fun.
The other downside (as others have already pointed out) is the weight of heavy glass containers built for reuse. It raises the cost of distribution.
What about something akin to soda stream, either at home or in store?
The USA will probably get something like that when it catches up in 100 years.
This was also about the time we started getting 2 liter plastic bottles.
It seems to me that if CO2 emissions for distributing heavier, reusable glass containers is a significant problem for our society, I can't imagine what we'll do with all the other (unrelated) things we have (and do) that have much bigger problems with emissions.
That is simply not true, just go to most of Europe. In Switzerland 83% of PET bottles get recycled. 0% ends up directly in landfills.
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/fact-check_is-switzerland-the-w...
For the rest, plastic contains a good amount of energy. You can burn it and recover some energy from it. It also reduces the volume of the waste by 80%.