In the glass bottle example, you - the customer - take the bottles to a recycling center or to the grocery store. (I remember doing this with cans and bottles with my father as a young boy, growing up without a ton of money.)
In the Amazon example, you - the customer - take the bins... where? I live in Seattle, so it's easy enough for me to take them to an Amazon pickup location, but probably not for someone in rural Kansas.
Leave the bins out to be shipped back to UPS? Those bins are worth a considerable amount of money on deposit most likely, and are prime targets for theft or misappropriation. How is this resolved? You have created a large chain of custody problem and a large burden on their support team.
This is all doable. The price will just have to be quite a bit higher than it was in the past for what is likely fairly minimal positive impact on the environment. Take a look at industrial pollution / CO2 effects on the planet by country adjusted for GDP. The United States is not close to the prime offender today - and it'll be even worse in 30 years as China/India go through their own Industrial and Informational revolutions.
That's not actually the case though. Of course it's costly to Amazon to ship plastic containers, but you don't have to increase the price. In the case of the bottles, it was cheaper to pay people to return them than to make new glass bottles. Likewise, it's likely cheaper for Amazon to pay people to return new boxes than it is for them to send new ones.
The people are the ones helping Amazon cost-save, Amazon isn't doing anyone but themselves a favour by shipping better packaging. The only incentive from Amazon's perspective here is so that they market about how they're recycling more, and how much better protected the items are.
Better how?
>> Likewise, it's likely cheaper for Amazon to pay people to return new boxes than it is for them to send new ones.
Plastic is heavier and less uniform than cardboard boxes that UPS/DHL expect, making their trucks less efficient, which increases the prices to Amazon.
It's definitely not cheaper to do what you are suggesting. They wouldn't have stopped doing it in the first place if it was. They asked for customers to return the bins and everything, just like you are laying out. It did not work.
Mind: if it turns out that there are high-risk environments -- high crime neighbourhoods -- where a financial penalty could prove onerous and avoidance of true theft is difficult, delivery firms would have to come up with some alternative option in which return of the materials is assured. Failure to do so effectively replicates geographic redline or discrimination zones, even if the underlying cost risk models are valid representations of activities.
The point is to manage those risks in a non-discriminatory manner.
The problem seems solvable and would tremendously help Amazon's image as a green company.
Legitimately everyone would hate this change. People who work 9-5 M-F aren't interested in doing extra work to get their shampoo delivered via signature and/or pickup at some place 15-20 miles away in an industrial area.
For a pick-up / package-hold service, the unboxing could be supervised. Delivery drivers aren't going to want to wait for recipients to remove packaging. And in many cases, the signer won't be the same person as the unboxer.
or even worse, like you said, the signer won't necessarily be the recipient, so:
"Oh boy, I can't wait for my parents to unbox my sex toys and lingerie in front of a bored delivery driver"
I'm kind of shocked that you would think of this as a bad thing. If a person is given an item and they find a use for it that isn't harmful, why should that item be forcably repossessed?
I would absolutely appreciate a shipping service that takes back cardboard boxes, plastic, etc. used in the delivery of the item, and actually this used to be the case. The milkman wouldn't just deliver the bottles, he would take empty bottles and the company would reuse them. Soda companies as well, used to give out money to recoup the bottles used. It's really only when we moved to the supermarket system, and the plastic bottle, that we stopped doing this. But if you kept the bottles, they didn't outright charge you for it.
Actually, according to capitalism charging for the packaging would be a positive move but ineffective and probably negative over the long run.
This is because charging for the packaging means you can extract more of a profit from the consumer per delivery. The more packaging you can give them the harder it is to return it and the more you can charge for it (obviously this isn't linear because at some point the packaging costs more than you can easily charge, but in that instance you just do it gradually), and the more incentive for Amazon or whomever to make it difficult to return it. At the same time, it allows them to say that they're doing something, and provides a pretty good political defence for them for them to charge more per packaging.