I know they’re supposed to be good for the environment. But… Holy smokes they’re driving me up the wall. They really do!
I had no trouble adapting when aluminum can pull-tabs got replaced by push-tabs, because it was pretty much the same movement, and I could see the immediate advantage of not getting cut by a pull-tab.
But the tethered cap is fighting decades of muscle memory in me: I’m used to taking the cap off with one hand and keeping it there while taking a swig with the other. Now I unscrew the cap with one hand, but I still have to hold the cap so it’s out of the way. It feels like drinking in handcuffs each and every time…
So unlike the pull-tab, the tethered plastic bottle is one of those compulsory eco solutions that constantly make you feel ever-so-slightly more miserable all the time, and I hate that because ecology only works when it brings something of value both to people and to the environment.
You must log in or # to comment.
It does shit for the environment, no one throws caps away separately while recycling the bottle. Most coloured plastics aren’t recycled anyways. Like 80% of all microplastic is from car tires.
It was a very common plastic to be found on beaches. So they wanted to tether it to prevent garbage shit in the ocean.
But isn’t the tether still too thin and fragile to remain connected forever?
If you drop a tethered cap on the beach, a few weeks in the sun, getting polished by sand, and that cap is seperating from the ring, and how does that fix the problem?
I think it only needs to be connected until the bottle is collected, which I’d imagine it being plastic and the tether being surprisingly sturdy it will do alright
This also fucks a little with people collecting caps for selling them off later. Often people with cancer or other terminal diseases. I have zero idea how it is viable, but we see those very often in Poland.
https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC108181
Top categories of litter on EU beaches (table pdf page 81): #1 and 2 large and small plastic/polysterine pieces 14.90 and 13.83%, #3 strings and cords 13.75%. #4 cigarette butts 6.14%, #5 cough “Plastic caps and lids (drinks, chemicals, detergents (non-food), unidentified) / plastic rings from bottle caps/lids” 5.27%.
Bottles are a way smaller category so by tethering the caps you should get rid of all the caps without a bottle. There’s then another impact assessment (please don’t ask me for a link) looking at impact on the bottling industry and beverage market and it was deemed negligible, so Brussels went ahead and mandated tethered caps, comes into force in July.
This isn’t a question of “is the impact of the regulation big or small” but “do the pros of regulation outweigh the cons”, and they do. We’re not in the US over here.
deleted by creator
Oh, ok. Then there’s no problem, I guess?
/s
Pretty much, yeah.
I’m so happy I can fight my bottle when I want to drink, the solution could have been to have aluminium caps like for the glass bottles or even to switch to only glass bottles but noooo, let’s use more plastic to make sure people wrestle with their beverages
acting this dramatic about a little piece of plastic is embarassing dude, stop posting
Wait this is new? It’s been around since I was born (which is not as recently as y’all might think). Maybe it’s just the country I live in.
I wouldn’t even call this mildly … Anything
I get why they’re there. But I don’t like them because you now need to orient the bottle in such a manner you aren’t sticking your nose in the cap. Not such a big deal for small soda bottle tops, but I like kefir and some sport drink tops are huge, and that makes it pretty damn annoying to work around and now you’ve got this cap resting on your cheek sometimes.
Detach one side of the cap by twisting. This allows turning the cap down to the bottle neck. You can then hold the cap out of the way and the bottle with one hand.
In what way are they better for the environment? I’m confused
Bottle caps stay tethered to the bottles when bottles are taken in for recycling. They don’t end up on the ground.
Which is weird, since I have never seen anyone dispose of a screw-on lid improperly. It‘s always just the caps to glass bottles you see lying around.
That’s the thing. I never saw plastic bottle caps on the ground because people want to close the bottle after use. It’s only good for green washing.
The EU took an inventory of what kind of plastic ends up on beaches, bottle caps weren’t the #1 offender but bottles were much rarer so it stands to reason that when you attach the caps to the bottles you get rid of a lot of plastics on beaches.
Wait, the rings of plastic bottle caps were also among the top ten? Who takes the time zo pry off the ring and why would they do this to begin with? This feels like there‘s still a piece missing.
It was one very common plastic garbage found on the beach. I think that’s exactly what lead them to make the decision to do this.
Will you please stop watching me dispose of my litter. It’s creepy.
Here is what makes no sense to me - if someone throws the caps on the ground, wouldn’t they be less likely to put the bottle in a recycling bin as well?
It’s wielder that that. There was a period when my plastics bin actively got rejected if the caps were still on the bottle. To this day I have no clue why but they can’t do that anymore
Different kinds of plastic
I saw it for the first time last summer. Did a little reading, and according to the news articles, it was a EU directive, but it had been heavily lobbied for by Coca Cola. If I remember right, all EU countries should have implemented the necessary legislature by June this year.
I personally just tear the caps off. Can’t get used to them.
Never noticed, cut top off the bottle with my limited edition Tenchu katana. I show no mercy
I have never seen one of these. Can you not just like, rip it off?
You can, but it takes a considerable amount of force.
My stubbornness knows no bounds.
First time hearing about this too . What country is this done in ?
The UK for one. The US too judging the use of $ in other comments.
In my experience it leaves after a sharp edge when you rip the cap off which then pokes your hands when you try to put the cap back on.
When they first introduced these, my brother thought it was a defect and ripped it off. It leaves a pretty sharp bit of plastic behind and he cut his hand when he screwed the lid back on. I get the idea behind them (it’s so you have to recycle the cap along with the bottle) but there’s got to be a better way than this. It makes it a pain to pour a drink or drink directly from the bottle.
Pour it from the opposite side to where the cap is attached. That way the awkwardness of pouring the liquid over the attached cap is a none issue. I can only assume that’s what you’ve been trying to do.
I’ve not been trying to pour the drink over the cap, no. It’s just fiddly and you have to make sure the cap doesn’t flap back over the bottle while you’re pouring. I can’t be the only person who finds them inconvenient in this respect? Surely there’s a better way of keeping the cap attached without it getting in the way?
It’s just fiddly and you have to make sure the cap doesn’t flap back over the bottle while you’re pouring.
The new-style tethered caps I’ve seen over here latch in the open position, no dangling no flopping.
You can, but there’s enough plastic to make it non-trivial, particularly if you don’t want to risk destroying the cap.
They definitely mess with your muscle memory, both when opening it, and drinking from it.
I tried to take them off a few times until I realized it was on purpose and not a manufacturing defect.
The problem isn’t the force it takes to rip it off: that’s easy enough to do. The problem is that the now-free cap has sharp edges that really hurt, and the plastic bottle now has an annoying dangling plastic tail.
Op, where are you at? I’ve never seen these OR the aluminum push tabs you mentioned
The push tab is what’s common on aluminum cans for the last several decades. The 70s had the pull tab style cans.
Ok, so "pull tabs"are what you see on like cans of SPAM?
https://i.imgur.com/AZrO380.jpeg
Pull tabs were mostly phased out when I was a kid but these were still around.
I feel like I’ve only ever seen Donald Duck OJ as part of a cheap hotel’s complimentary breakfast! 😆
I remember foil tabs like those on a few things, but I was born a smidge too late for “pop tops,” which pulled off the same way, but were as thick as the to of the can. People supposedly just tossed the little shrapnel pieces everywhere for people to get poked with. Hence the switch to a tab that stayed connected to the can.
I remember Jumex always had that foil pull tab.
I understand that stepping on one could blow out your flip flop.
Sounds like a euphemism.
Lol yes, they will always live on thanks to that reference!
I know UK and Norway are like this.
Just got back from England and Scotland and virtually every plastic bottle had these. It was the first time I’ve ever seen them before too (I live in the US)
EU. They mandated because of some recycling reason that doesn’t make much sense.
Easy solution: only buy drinks in aluminum cans or glass bottles. World is already drowning in microplastic pollution.
Surely making aluminum and glass cans isn’t good for the environment either is it?
Aluminum and glass are natural and just use heat and presses to renew and transform into desired forms.
Plastic takes a lot more processing and isn’t readily recyclable.
Well, glass bottles can be washed and reused. The beer industry does this as standard practice.
Glass and aluminum are easier to recycle. Actually recycling these two materials are an order of magnitude easier and cheaper than new material.
Plastic can be recycled, but has a faster degradation rate and the infrastructure isn’t present on the scale of glass and aluminum.
Interesting. How do the beer companies get their bottles back to reuse?
In my area, it through the recycling. Beer bottles have always been worth $0.05, so its worth it to return them to a depot. They also get sorted out if you leave them on the curb or takenby someone who wants the bottle deposit.
Returning them through the deposit makes sense, but I never would think that the recycling pickup people would sort them. Ours just take it to the dump
the recycling pickup people
It’s not, it’s usually retirees or homeless people doing it for cash
So how do they return the bottles to the distributors?
Making brand new ones from raw sand/ore isn’t great when you consider the need to mine and refine those into something useable. Lots of energy and effort goes into that part. The difference is that glass and aluminum are essentially infinitely recyclable, while plastic is often not. It takes way less effort and minimal input of new resources to recycle a glass bottle. Hell, with a robust bottle return system you can skip over the recycling part entirely - just send them back to the bottling facility to be cleaned and refilled.
Emphasis on “plastic is often not”. Only PET (#1 on the symbol) can truly be recycled into new material, and usually it’s tossed in with other materials and contaminated enough to make that not possible. There is the reusable path, where plastics are remolded into other purposes, but that’s not “really” recycling and likely ends there for that form to eventually degrade and be trashed.
So just make more things with PET and recycle better, right? I’m guessing there’s limitations on what PET can be used for given its characteristics vs. other plastics, and it is still cheaper to just get new material for new PET rather than recycle. So of course companies are going to go that route.
The interesting thing that I learned not so long ago from the YT channel Climate Town is that people see the triangle symbol with the plastic type number inside and assume it’s recyclable, since that’s the recycle symbol. But it’s not that symbol, it’s just designed similar to give that impression.
Glass is a bugger to recycle as even little admixtures of the wrong stuff can spoil the whole batch. Crush it up and it’s very useful as aggregate in concrete, though. In the case of glass it’s much better to reuse than recycle.
Glas is also heavy meaning it costs more energy to transport, overall PET bottles actually have a quite good environmental and climate record provided they actually get recycled.
Stainless steel is also infinitely recyclable and should be able to be used without liners. Shouldn’t even be heavier than aluminium cans as steel and aluminium are ballpark equally strong by weight (aluminium is stiffer though, not necessarily an advantage). PET is probably going to need less energy of all when recycling, though.
Problem is the stainless steel you’d need to use in order to get the corrosion resistance and non-reactivity with the contents is prohibitively expensive. Cheap stainless steel alloys offer pretty poor corrosion resistance - see the CyberTruck rusting after being rained on a few times.
Hmm. Random price for 1.4571 (probably complete overkill): 20 Euro/kg. Let’s say we use a bit more material than current alu cans, 20g per, that’s 50 cans per kg or 40ct per can quite a bit more than the 25ct deposit we currently have on cans. OTOH that was a random price for 50cm of round stock of the right diameter to get to 1kg, if you’re actually buying it in bulk from the mill it should be quite a bit cheaper (also while you’re at it get sheets). Doubly so if you can feed that mill with very pure recycling material they barely have to touch to get up to spec again.
I’d say it’s doable.
Sorry but that doesn’t work. Just 5% of the community does it and everybody else doesn’t care. Laws need to be passed.
Microplastic is mostly tires and fishing nets so tax those first I think.
Um, aren’t tires like 99.9% rubber?
Not modern tires.
Easy solution: limit yourself to a subset of the market and alter your behavior throughout your life.
I wish there was more water sold in those little milk boxes or aluminum cans.
Aluminium cans have a thin plastic liner inside them that’s almost impossible to recycle. I’m not sure if you’re fixing much by switching to cans, here…
Glass is better, but any carbonated drink turns into a bomb if you put more than half a liter or so in a closed glass container.
Cans are great from an energy-consumption point of view when viewing the entire lifecycle of a can.
Aluminium cans have a thin plastic liner inside them that’s almost impossible to recycle
Confidently incorrect as a motherfucker.
You’re saying without hesitation that one of the most recycled and recyclable materials ever created is flat out not recyclable. What the fuck?
But He is right… Most cans have a layer
That doesn’t make them non-recyclable does it?
It makes it Hard to recycle… Because splitting aluminium from Plastik isnt easy
Yes, it is actually. You melt the aluminum and skim off any remaining plastic and contaminants from the top of the molten aluminum. It’s a standard, millenniums old process for any metal working.
The plastic liner is impossible to recycle, isn’t it?
The plastic liners in and on tins and cans - referred to as lacquer in the industry - don’t impact recycling. When the tins are heated to thousands of degrees for recycling, what is left of the plastic liner, the inks and UV materials; is separated and basically skimmed off, leaving the metal.
https://ekko.world/plastic-lining-on-beverage-food-cans/226751
I had only learned of the liner this year, and have been wondering about this ever since, but always forgot what I wanted to look up every time I got to the search bar. You have rescued me from repeating this for the remainder of the year, and have my thanks. All of the thanks.
Ah, so instead of recycling it, they burn the plastic away. I suppose carcinogenic smoke isn’t as long-lasting as microplastics?
Yeah because reducing the plastic used by 99% should be scoffed at because AlUmInUm Is NoT rEcYcLAbLe
The thin plastic liner is impossible to recycle. Not the aluminium, obviously.
Now I unscrew the cap with one hand, but I still have to hold the cap so it’s out of the way.
That shouldn’t be the case. Companies have done some design work and came up with proper solutions, such as the cap snapping into open position, it’ll be completely out of the way provided you turn the bottle the right way. Which actually should work with the one in the picture you posted. Maybe some bottling line somewhere didn’t get the memo, or they’re using up old stock, or whatnot, those that are simply attached but don’t latch are indeed awkward, but that kind of thing should vanish from the market quite quickly especially once tethered caps actually do become mandatory in July.
It’s still a change of habit but you get used to latching very quickly.
Or one could just rip that shit off because one thought it was a shitty manufacturing error.
Not much chance of that happening once literally all plastic bottles come with the caps attached.
It’s shit like this that makes me realise carrying a knife hasn’t lost its utility.
I’ve never seen this before. I’m not sure how I’d feel about it.
