Stop drinking bottled water: Experts warn of health and climate impacts

considers

So, this is a problem for the whole bottled drink industry. Bottled drinks exist because you have a disposable container, and people need a container to contain the drink.

It's possible to have non-disposable containers, but then you're:

• Requiring everyone to carry around a non-disposable container. I keep a water bottle on my bike, but I don't normally have one everywhere I go, and I'm sure that most people don't either. There's a convenience factor.
• Creating a problem of how to meter anything you sell. If I get a bottle of cola or whatever, it's pre-measured. 7-11 does provide an option to buy a 7-11 branded reusable container and then get a discount on sodas and slushies that use it, but that's measured in size; they aren't going to let people just come in and fill up a container that claims that it is of some arbitrary size. If you wanted to shift to non-disposable containers, where only the liquid is what stores sell, then you'd need to also shift to some kind of metered dispenser. We don't have that infrastructure in place today. I'd guess that that's because drink-dispensing were originally built for restaurants to use behind the counter, and then in some cases shifted to all-you-can-drink setups, but in either case, didn't need metering.
• Losing the sanitary chain. Many drinks are sold in sealed containers, are sterile at time of sale. Until you open them, they won't "go bad", even stored at room temperature. For some things, that's fine -- you're going to consume them right away. But that's not true for everything out there.
• A pallet of bottled drinks is pretty low-maintenance. A drink dispenser requires maintenance.

That being said, there are some potential gains:

• Disposable containers have to be cheap, because they are, well, disposable. If you use reusable containers, there are a lot of nice things you can do. They can be more comfortable, can have nice lips, can have things like vacuum walls to keep temperature where you want it, etc.
• You are much less constrained to use fixed-size units; it's easy to "add" another size unit to a machine that dispenses liquid: it just runs for longer. If you want to have large cups or thermoses or small cups or thermoses, you can. Without that, you're kinda constrained to one-size-fits-all.
• You aren't constrained to one design of container. Some people are super-worried about plastic bottles and want metal bottles. Other people want something transparent that they can see through. Other people want something lightweight. Others want thermal insulation. You can let all of those groups be happy.
• For drinks made with concentrate, if you don't care about the specific type of water, you can avoid a lot of costs. Some people do care, and is one reason that branded bottled water sells. But soda machines take pouches of syrup in boxes, and there, it's almost certainly more-space-efficient and probably more transport-efficient to use municipal water, rather than trucking in a bunch of bottles of water.