Cynicism, on the other hand - that’s always good.
Thanks for the safe microplastics!!!
it said good, not safe. It will still kill you but in a good way
Killing me softly with this cap.
That’s an EU regulation, not a corporate measure. And it has drastically decreased the amount of littered bottle caps, so a good thing.
I was interested in that whole ecoli eating plastic and producing 95% acetaminophen from it by mass. Maybe we can stop a lot of the plastic from water/soda bottles and just medicate ourselves till our livers shit themselves out our assholes.
Also it means recycle schemes get a % boost because a lot more bottles come back for recycling with their caps. I wouldn’t be surprised if the cap is 10-20% of the total plastic in a bottle so caps were missing then that’s wasted opportunity.
I remember as a kid when ring pulls on case used to detach and that’s the same thing too. I remember my dad metal detecting on the beach and he’d recover dozens of ringpulls because people just tossed them.
An EU regulation that was heavily lobbied for by Coca Cola.
it costs coca cola more to produce those attached caps than not, are you saying coca cola was pushing for saving the environment? lol
It’s an EU regulation meant to battle bottle caps being a major problem for marine wild life, where bigger sea mammals and fish swallow them and suffocate from it. Why are you lobbying for mega corporations willingly and for free? Did you hit your head as child one time too many?
Really? I never heard that before. What would they care about how their caps are? I can’t see it having any impact on them at all. A lot of people got pissed about it when Coca Cola was one of the first to change the caps in line with the regulation, so if anything it hurt Coca Cola.
Also even though large corporations are almost always totally evil, it’s not impossible for them to do something good as well. Probably not for the right reasons, but still, one thing doesn’t exclude the other.
It perpetuates the myth of recycling and puts the onus on the consumer and state to recycle instead of the corporations to stop using containers that pollute the environment, will be in the environment for decades without breaking down, and is likely causing yet unknown harm in our bodies since plastic is inside all of us now.
The first of the “3 R’s” is reduce but instead of that being the focus because it hurts their bottom line, they prop up recycling and sell the lie that we can keep living as is if we just recycle more and get better at recycling.
My guess - somebody at coca-cola figured out the cap attachment system and they patented it, but had no real plan. Then someone had the idea to lobby the EU to make it a requirement. They can sell it because it will reduce litter to some extent and improve the beverage industry’s reputation. But more importantly, coca-cola not already has their manufacturing systems in place to produce these bottle caps. Other bottle manufacturers must now play catch up, constraining the supply of bottles available for EU beverage sales. Now their competitors are scrambling to update their own bottles, which will increase their costs and might delay shipments, lending coca-cola market share. And smaller competitors who outsource their bottling might be forced out of the market entirely if the company they contract with to manufacture their bottles can’t or won’t comply with this regulation.
No idea why they’d want those tethered caps. My speculation (and that’s 100% unfounded, so take it as you will) is that they are lobbying for something simple and cheap (tethered caps, plastic straws, etc), to blind people from the real environmental issues that are far more costly to tackle. Kind of like the plastic recycle logo, which is a total scam, but makes people feel good enough to not further question the big corps’ recycling practices.
Can you show a link that supports that? Because I distinctly recall these companies opposing this measure.
He can’t because it’s not true.
This is a EU regulation and it’s a good one.
The only thing I can find in this direction is a letter from beverage companies (including coca cola) opposing these measures. But that’s based on a very shallow google search, so take it with a grain of salt. Where can I find info about what coca cola lobbied for or against?
Littered bottle caps was a problem? Anyway, I hope they do cigarette filters next.
That’s an EU regulation, not a corporate measure. And it has drastically decreased the amount of littered bottle caps, so a good thing.
you should only be allowed to buy cigarettes if you can account for all your ciggy butts or pick-up an equal amount.
In Australia they have something called “report a tosser” people who are proven to have littered anything from cigarette buds to plastic bottles and more will be fined to hell and back.
Imagine the power of combining this tosser initiative with the revenue sharing aspect of New York’s vehicle idling program. Save the planet and get paid all at the same time.
Do like Japan with ammunition. You have to turn in your spent cases to buy more.
exactly where i got the idea :D
The caps was a problem yes. Not just littering, but also in sorting for recycling, where they’d often end up in the wrong place.
It obviously depends on where and how it’s done, but the thing I’ve heard is that due to (the lack of) weight and size the bottle caps would end up in the paper badges, which would ruin the paper from being recycled. It’s better if it follows the bottle. PET bottles (including caps) are shredded, washed and used for new bottles.
Same thing happened to the pull tabs on aluminium cans. Those used to be separate too.
I really like the can tabs. The plastic bottle caps annoy me because they make it harder to screw the cap back on. It needs a bit more innovation in my mind.
Those float in the sea, we don’t want that iiuc. Is a different plastic too, way more valuable from a recycling perspective (in Argentina hospitals used to collect caps to melt and make toys for childrens)
It works by applied statistics.
When you littered before - with the old cap - you’d have two pieces of plastic, now they are connected and it’s only one piece.
I’m only mildy annoyed by the new lids and got used to them, but it’s the bottle cap regulation is one of those that’s purely better for statistics.
It reduces littering by bottles to around half, just because we count the pieces differently now.
Maybe we should better just start taxing by the amount of plastic used in food packaging, as a lot of the packages get bigger and bigger just to display the contents more visibility.
It reduces littering by bottles to around half, just because we count the pieces differently now.
Beyond the statistics, collecting bottles seems easier than collecting bottle caps. Since people can’t stop tossing their trash in the street, at least it makes it easier for people that clean up to get them.
In many countries people collect their own bottles because there is a refundable tax on the container. Here in Ireland it’s 15c, i.e. a can of coke might be €1 but you’ll be charged €1.15. So it motivates people to take the empties back to a supermarket and receive a refund chit. It also motivates homeless people to pick up bottles & cans that people toss, so that too.
That’s an idea, but it requires the incentive to be more than people… let’s call it laziness. I see people drop their trash in front of an empty trashcan on the regular.
Regarding plastic bottle deposit, a quick search (https://www.statista.com/chart/22963/global-status-of-plastic-bottle-recycling-systems/) around 30 countries had such a system in place, with varying degrees of success, with only 10 US states. That’s not a lot. In France, we also had this for glass bottle. It was discontinued long ago but we’re looking to bring it back. Let’s hope this do motivate people, although I don’t have my hopes up.
Germany collects glass, plastic & aluminium. Glass and plastic can be single use or multiuse. It’s kind of interesting how most beer is sold multi-use (every brand is using the same size bottles) to reduce the amount of recycling necessary. Beer bottles can be washed and reused rather than broken into cullet and remelted. I don’t know what France does but I could see people losing their minds if wine bottles were standardised the way beer is. But really glass could be collected and recycled even if it isn’t reusable.
I get what you’re trying to say about homeless people, and there are many people reliant on collecting plastic bottles in Germany too, but motivation in that context sounds a tad off imo
Annoying? Am I the only one who thinks it’s more convenient? The cap cannot fall, you can open it one handed, you cannot lose the cap…
I’m not saying its good that homeless people rely on collecting bottles. But the fact they have cash value means they will collect them and feed them back into the system. So less litter and more recycling.
If you don’t like the new caps then the company that made that bottle screwed up.
Exactly - some are perfectly fine. The cheap ones are terrible, crossthread too easily, get up in your face, dribble, or all of the above.
Sports style bottles solved the problem long before standard caps got in the game. They get disposed of together here either way, even if the cap gets yanked off for being stupid.
I don’t understand how they end up separate in disposal in the first place. The whole point is that you can reseal the bottle and move/store it without leaking. If you’re not actively using the bottle, it gets resealed to move or store. When you finish the bottle, you probably have the cap still in hand or very close by.
Tangentially, I’d love to see a Pfand type system here.
Conspiracy theory of mine - I’m European, so not sure if valid for the other side of the pond, but there was a massive campaign here to recycle the bottle caps by donating them for the creation of incubators for premature births. The local authorities placed massive donation boxes shaped like a heart and they were getting filled constantly.
Here’s the theory: When the campaign started getting up to speed, they started attaching the bottle caps to the bottle, because, I strongly believe, that out there, there is an absolute evil cunt who only feels something when a baby dies, so he wants fewer donated caps, because deep inside he knows people don’t care enough to snap the cap off.
I’ve seen one if these, so that is what they are for!
Can incubators not be made out of PET? why not accept and recycle the whole bottle?
Simon Clark had a pretty good nuanced video on recycling and goes over plastics recycling in the latter parts of the video https://youtu.be/iOtrvBdRx8I
TL;DW Consider the environmental impact of systems over materials, most plastic doesn’t get recycled but some types of plastic are highly recyclable, existing plastic is undervalued, reduce > reuse > recycle.
I rip those off out of spite
And they also force people to buy plastic bottles? That is so mean.
In a lot of places, yes. If that’s your only way to get water, you will be getting it from a bottle. Water, you know, is important to day-to-day life.
Thanks for explaining, I was worried this was a band aid mesure which didn’t solve to root cause. /s
I was interested in that whole ecoli eating plastic and producing 95% acetaminophen from it by mass. Maybe we can stop a lot of the plastic from water/soda bottles and just medicate ourselves till our livers shit themselves out our assholes.
The root problem is that plastic can be recycled but many countries to not motivate their populations to recycle, nor their industries to use reusable containers or to purchase recycled materials and create circular economies. In countries that do have deposit return schemes, reuse & recycling rates are far higher. I see attaching the cap to the bottle as way to squeeze a little more % out of those schemes.
while technically true it’s not accurate, the real reason to attach the cap is simply that we don’t fucking want bottlecaps strewn about everywhere.
Attached cap prevents it from becoming a macroplastic
I like the convenience of not losing the cap
Easier to walk around with an open bottle too since you don’t have to hold the cap or put it into your pocket
Even worse, “it’s mildly annoying, so I don’t wanna!” Ofc would be better if people didn’t throw em away at all, But alas
Removed by mod
I was handed a water bottle the.other day at a volunteer event and was lamenting the fact that in the US, we don’t have attached caps. I almost immediately lost mine. It’s possible to make them attached, AND not suck.
Real ones get their micro plastics by chewing on used car tires.
