I am somewhat suspicious as to whether this works out as being environmentally friendlier - i.e. the dishwasher paradox (in short: a dishwasher makes things easier, and uses less power and water and detergent to wash dishes then doing it by hand - people mistake struggle for effectiveness).

Because at a large scale, you've got a couple of parameters I can think of:

1. the mean lifetime before a bottle fails / is removed from service

2. the failure mode of the bottle (i.e. if it shatters, does it go to landfill or do you end up with pieces in the environment?)

3. the amount of water and detergents needed to wash them properly, given the uncontrolled nature of the environment they come from, and the amount of power.

4. revalidating that the bottle is in fact clean - again - due to the uncontrolled nature of the environment they come from

5. the extra shipping involved in moving the bottles around for reuse.

It's easily possible they reusable bottles don't actually work out being lower resource use then single-use disposables with controlled disposal (i.e. stabilized landfill). Cleaning things when you don't know where they've been is fraught and difficult.

Basically it can easily be possible that reusing bottles you already have in your possession and wash yourself is better, it's not necessarily true that it works at a larger scale.

I'm not sure what the reason behind it was, but I doubt it was environmental. We did this for 15 years or so (previous to that there were reusable glass bottles) so I doubt it was really unfeasible. If it were it would really have been stopped much earlier.

I think it's more the industry wanted to bring things in line with the rest of Europe, or that it was cheaper, rather than because it was better for the environment.