For example, Britain’s national mapping organisation’s brand is associated in our national consciousness with going to a small shop in a quaint village to get a map showing how to walk up a mountain. It’s called Ordnance Survey. If that sounds like Artillery Research to you, that’s because the project started because the king wanted to know how to accurately bomb Scotland.
Glass is also quite heavy, increasing logistics costs for transport - but in an ideal world where everything runs off renewable energy sources and stupid people didn’t ruin things for the rest of us - glass would indeed be the ideal medium.
But glass is easy to sterilize at the point of purchase and refilled. There are “zero waste” stores that do something like this already, so there’s nothing to bring in other than bulk product (instead of 100 cans or bottles).
Doesn’t work everywhere in our current, high-profit, low-care business models.