Jars are used to contain tons of different things, and require different form factors to do so. That said, I have a hard time seeing any benefit to the incredible range of dimensions on the types of lids products currently use (often different than each other only by millimeters). Standardization could improve reuse tremendously.
So my proposal is this:
- Establish around five diameters for jar openings that best fit the many use cases.
- Standardize the threads.
- Jars can be whatever shape, height, width you want but their openings must conform to those standards.
- Ideally these standard sizes will include the existing canning jar dimensions.
Then, with the production of home canning rims and lids that fit those dimensions, all jars used in commercial products can be canning jars.
I'm not proposing this IRL because I know it would require a lot of changes in industry and assembly lines and I'm not sure how that would balance against the benefits of standardization. But the current system seems unnecessarily wasteful, even if glass is easier to recycle than many materials.