It's worth considering how the entire supply chain used to work. In days of yore, soft drink bottling plants were in every small town. They were locally owned

It's worth considering how the entire supply chain used to work. In days of yore, soft drink bottling plants were in every small town. They were locally owned, were good citizens and local suppliers of jobs, sponsored sports teams. Distributors used to pick up bottles sorted for their bottlers and then put them in a great big bottle yard for further hand sorting (don't ask me how I know). Beer, while they mostly used brown bottles (Miller for one excepted), also was much more locally sourced although not as locally. In the meantime, there was huge consolidation in beer manufacturing, huge consolidation in distribution (with the inevitable forced closure of family-owned businesses, not dissimilar to car dealerships), similar consolidation in soft drink manufacture. The whole underlying network changed in the interest of efficiency/profit maximization for the corporate motherships. tl;dr You simply can't just declare reuse of bottles and be done with it. There's a whole ecosystem.