Sure, maybe water was a poor example. Let's look at milk, assuming we don't all have cows at hand here.

In most places, you can only buy it in plastic and sometimes paper carton, though that seems to be dwindling. There are no other options, so people just grab the plastic one.

There's a local place by me that sells their milk in beautiful glass jugs. They charge $5 a jug, but you get that back if you return it unbroken to buy more. That place sells a ton, it's just that most people don't even have the option.

It seems though companies have zero incentive to do such a program. There's no reward for recycling as above, and no punishment for being wasteful. However we change that - either via tax or law, I'd be on board with.

That's an interesting example.

Keep in mind that single use items like plastic or paper cartons also only have a finite cost in terms of resources and environmental impact. So you'd have to weigh that against the potentially more annoying logistics of having to go back to the store to return your glass jug; especially if you do that journey by car. (Recycling glass is about as resource intensive as making new glass. And both take a lot more than making a tetrapak.)

I grew up in Germany, where re-using glass bottles is widespread, most iconically for beer. So on the consumer side there's unlikely to be extra journeys for that: most stores take bake used bottles.

Aluminum and steel cans are widely recycled around the world as far as I can tell. So much so that you can actually get (small amounts of) money for collecting aluminum cans. No extra law or tax required there: if you don't recycle your can, in many places someone else will.