Why can't the government forced standardized bottles and containers?

I recall when all drink bottles were recycled, with a deposit. A small coke was 5 cents including a 2 cent deposit. About 90-95% compliance. Companies would steam clean, use a crossed polariser inspection light to check for cracks/dead mice and refill them. Now they have passed the plastic buck to the trash recyclers. Some jurisdictions have plastic bottle deposits and they have good compliance. Beer bottles are often still glass - recycled. There is huge puchback by supermarkets on deposits - they would have to count, sort, box millions of wet/sticky bottles, glass or plastic. Bottles can be bar coded and customers forced to feed them in one at a time into a machine that compresses them and drops them into category boxes = pure one type. Metal ones, the same method, another machine. Some towns in various places now because the forced return for a deposit by these machines is a net positive, as they get purer stream of semi pure plastic = $$ from recyclers, while mixed often have a fee to take away. They must mandate deposits/sorts/returns as the huge mass of waste plastic is already a serious problem and burning = carbon into the air.

> With this mandate, now I can take my used shampoo bottle and refill it at the store (assuming stores offer this).

Do you really need a standardized bottle for this? As long as the shampoo dispenser measures how much product it dispenses, it doesn't matter what it dispenses into.

I suppose the machine (or attendant) needs to know what to do if the customer tries to buy 330ml but only has a 250ml bottle, and they might feel cheated if they over-fill the bottle and some product leaks down the side, but shops will be incentivized to make this less likely to happen if they want customers to come back.

There might also be a problem with cross-contamination of unclean containers touching a nozzle, which is taken seriously by some in the food service industry[0], but hasn't stopped restaurants offering Coca-Cola Freestyle machines to customers.

[0] https://cellarcraftuk.com/cross-glass-contamination-legaliti...

Ah, always nice (though rare) to meet a fellow member of my species, Homo Economicus. You aren't female perchance? You don't have to answer that, I already know.

You specified size in ounces, why not metric? I'd read up on that a bit and if you don't lose all hope after that, come back and we can talk about the rest.

it's a great idea, but - depending on where you live * - in the current political climate (i.e. corporate consensus) it's on a scale of "unlikely" to "the opposite is more likely"

this might fly in the Germanic countries (sans England), but in most Western countries the corporate pushback would be far too high.

even if long-term it would be cheaper, businesses a) don't like change, and b) don't like being restricted in any way whatsoever. imagine how hard coca-cola would lobby to keep using their classic bottle design. imagine how easy it would be for the corporate-owned press to sell this as Sovietism reborn or some other such nonsense

I feel like in America and the more right-wing countries, you're far more likely to be seeing a law enshrining the future rights of businesses to non-homogeneity

*America, based on your use of fluid ounces

standard issue nalgene water bottle at birth would get my vote.