I think specifically of milk bottles.

Plastic milk bottles have to be brought from hundreds of miles away to my local dairy. Post-consumer, they're trucked close to 50 miles to the nearest landfill, or a couple of hundred miles to the nearest reprocessing company, or thousands of miles to another country's reprocessing facilities.

By contrast, glass milk bottles (widely available in the last five cities in which I've lived) are trucked to the dairy once. Then post-consumer they get returned to the same dairy for cleaning and re-use over and over and over again. Some bottles have clearly been through this process many times, as they show signs of wear and have less clarity than the random new glass bottle.

I prefer re-using things to recycling things, but I'm apparently in the minority. When I mentioned glass milk bottles at work once, nobody knew what I was talking about, even though I know they've seen them since we all shop at the same supermarkets.

Instinctively, I'd wish we got back to reusable glass bottles for most things; as inconvenient as they are when shopping, maybe we could get that back in the era of increasing home delivery of groceries. That said, I recall someone on HN bringing up the following point: plastics are probably energetically cheaper to manufacture than their reusable equivalents. For plastic bags, I think the ratio was around 1000 uses before a reusable "eco" bag started to come ahead of disposable plastic bags, energy-wise. I suspect the calculation for glass bottles will be similar, once you account for the costs of cleaning.

Ecologically speaking, AFAIK the main problem with disposable plastics isn't their carbon footprint, but microplastics getting into the food chain. That means better garbage management is the crucial issue here.

I'm not saying this to defend the proliferation of disposable plastics - in fact, I have an instinctive and deep hate for single-use items where reusable alternatives could exist. I'm only saying this problem is nontrivial once you start accounting for energy use, or negative externalities. If there's some detailed analysis that tackles this issue thoroughly, I'd love to read one and update my views.

I’ve heard that aluminium pots and pans, as well as traces in things like salt, are strongly linked to Alzheimer’s.

A middle-ground alternative would be returning to glass once transportation is fully electric and based on clean energy. Still lots of downsides, not an easy problem to solve.