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.
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
I think the cap thing is more about littering because in those countries people litter only the cap for some reason?
When cleaning up beaches and the like, those caps are the litter they found the most.
People lost them or didn’t bother to pick them up because they are so small. Unlike with the bottles themselves.
Since they switched to the new caps, the amount of caps found has decreased significantly.
So yes, they work. It is all based on data.
Ofc it is, but stupid fucks have to complain about mundane shit
OP is a 2 day old account. If you haven’t figured it out yet, there is a massive anti-progress astroturfing campaign all over the Internet, and it’s little shit like this which quietly switches people into cynical brain rot. Memes are bumper sticker politics, and you should always be skeptical of them when they are pushing any narrative.
I’m only complaining about all the people that apparently regularly lost bottle caps. I don’t think that has happened to me ever… Not the end of the world and if it reduces litter I’ll deal with it but I curse these people every time one of the new caps is being annoying to screw back on.
Minority opinion, but I like those style caps. I like that I dont have to hold the cap. It’s much easier on the go.
Yeah I got used to them fairly quickly when visiting Europe recently. At first it was a bit annoying - kinda in the way when drinking and harder to twist back on properly. But after a few days you get the hang of it, and in some ways I prefer that style now.
Also, the caps separated from the bottle fall through dinky cracks easier, like street drain covers) and get lost easier (or drop out of the bottom of the bin easier, etc.), being attached to the large bottle makes that more difficult to occur.
The bottle has a deposit on it, the cap doesn’t
Not true for most EU countries.
I’m not sure then. Maybe because people litter the cap right when they open it, but end up carrying the partially full drink with them?
True for all Euro places that I have been to that had deposits
not Italy
Not sure if this applied universally, but I remember for years and years the common knowledge was that plastic caps are unrecyclable for some reason, and there used to be separate bins to toss them at recycling centers. That’s no longer the case, so keeping the cap connected to the bottle is one way to demonstrate that they should be recycled together.
(By “recycled” I mean most likely shipped to Southeast Asia to then most likely just find their way into the ocean)
IIRC the reason most caps used to be unrecyclable (many still are) is that they had a liner in them made of a different material. Because such caps were composite materials (using different types of plastic for the liner and the cap), they would make an impure product if recycled. The same problem applies if the cap and bottle are different types of plastic, which used to be more common.
I remember they used to collect bottle caps to donate to charities that used it to make stuff for dogs and stuff
(By “recycled” I mean most likely shipped to Southeast Asia to then most likely just find their way into the ocean)
You would be wrong; PET bottles are mostly actually recycled, because it recycles very well (also, why would places go to the effort of setting up a deposit/return scheme for something they aren’t actually recycling? Just throw it in the blue bag with all the other plastic that doesn’t actually get recycled)
I think the kind of plastic used in bottles is one of very few that actually are profitable to recycle. PET, I think. This is actually something recycling companies want. Most other plastic is just burned or shipped somewhere.
PET is so hilariously easy to recycle that you can literally just clean out bottles and put them in a little jig that cuts it into strips and feeds it into a 3d printer, it’s not peak quality or anything but it totally works.
This is why I stopped recycling and put everything in the trash.
For one I was so sad when I found out what a scam it is that such a small amount of stuff is actually recycled and especially plastic never was actually planned to be recycled.
Two, I’d rather most of the plastic end up in our own landfill than to be shipped overseas into someone else’s or just end up in the ocean. We deserve to poison our own land thanks to our politicians not holding corporations to account.
Cynicism, on the other hand - that’s always good.
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.
Thanks for explaining, I was worried this was a band aid mesure which didn’t solve to root cause. /s
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.
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.
PET bottle recycling is the only part of plastics recycling that actually works. Making sure the bottle caps are also correctly returned to recycling plants is a good goal. Also it makes picking up litter a little easier, because now you only need to pick up one thing instead of two.
Btw, this is why clothing/bags/… made out of recycled plastic bottles is actually a terrible idea, because once the PET is out of the bottle recycling stream it is permanently removed from this recycling loop and new PET needs to be produced to compensate.
We just need thousands more little steps. It all adds up. Like the whole plastic straws debacle. While mocked, it’s one more little step.
Yeah, the big problem is that each of these steps takes monumental effort while yielding only very little result.
At the current pace, new areas of plastic waste generation are added much faster than old areas are removed.
While we were busy banning plastic straws and plastic bags and stuck the cap onto the bottle, the plastic garbage production industry added thousands new types of unrecyclable products.
I don’t disagree.
while i can appreciate the goal and potential result, those attached caps are terribly impractical, i wish they’d find a better solution
Do you know that these caps can be overextended? They have a second open position, where they are opened at ~180°. At that position they don’t flop back closed and are quite well out of the way.
nah they dont go far enough for my big nose and that makes it awkward and messy, may depend on the bottle and the nose i guess
I don’t know what % of plastic the cap comprises in a plastic bottle but I bet its double digits. So annoying as it is to use, attaching the cap to the bottle does make sense for recycling. It also lessens litter.
But it needs to be paired up with a deposit refund scheme. Lots of countries do this already and encourages circular economies - the soft drinks companies purchasing recycle material to reuse. I bet those schemes measured a significant jump in recovered plastic when virtually all the caps come back with the bottles.
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…
from what i can tell it’s like half a percent of a percent of people who give a singular thought to it beyond “oh they changed it”
Not only that, but the plastic in the cap is actually made of plastic that is better recyclable than the rest of the bottle.
The cap and the bottle in soft drinks are made of PET. Most deposit schemes will accept plastic (PET), or aluminium and a machine will separate and sort the material into the appropriate bin. Cans get melted down, plastic is stripped, washed, turned into pellets and fed back into hoppers that make new bottles. Because it’s all the same plastic material it can be ground up into pellets and fed back into a machine to make new bottles. The biggest issue is probably that caps are usually black, red, blue or whatever so I imagine somewhere in the process the chopped up plastic goes past cameras that sort fragments by colour.
On other news, there are biodegradable plastics. We should probably use those more. Sure we’ll end up with biodegradable plastic in our bodies but basically it would be inert. PVA, PVOH and CMC for example are inert plastic-like chemicals that can coat stuff in foams. CMC for example makes the clear gel that you put on your hair as well as the gel-like behavior you get from various cosmetics. PVA/PVOH is part of non toxic glue. and what’s in those molecules? Just carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, nothing more than what’s already in our bodies.
Hahehahahehhahahahahhrha I don’t know what a thing is for
I know it’s supposed to help with recycling, the issue is that it fails to address the core of the problem. Instead of actually doing something about plastic waste, they change the bottle design a little, someone probably makes a shitload of money off that, and everyone is happy, but in reality nothing of substance has actually been done. They offer us these pathetic compromises and we are stupid enough to be satisfied with them.
That’s not about companies doing something, it’s just a new law
It’s supposed to help with littering, not recycling. And I’ve never once seen a water bottle company advertise an attached lid as some sort of ground breaking benefit for the environment.
No it does very much so solve the problem it was meant to solve: to stop caps from becoming litter!
You must have a very funny life if you find things funny you don’t understand
What do you think happens to bottles after you throw them in the trash? They get shipped off to some landfill where they’re buried and forgotten about, that’s just littering with extra steps.
I am starting to think that you are very young, Lemmy is not supposed to be used by underage ppl! Yes yes yes, no one can stop you realistically but please consider why such a rule would be made! Not because Lemmy’s servers just cannot handle all the users…
Litter means rubbish in publics non-designated areas! If you want to use a word not for its conventional meaning, and if you wanted others to understand you for whatever reason, you start off with a definition
So trash in nature is ok as long as you don’t see it?
Anyways, it seems you are far more intelligent and knowledgeable than me, so it probably doesn’t make sense to debate you since I will lose either way…
Not knowing what words mean is fine, having a brain fart is fine at whatever age!! But crossing your arms and continuing to pretend that you have to be right…
Are the unseen parts of a forest meant for trash collection?
In the Netherlands plastic waste is mostly burned, I believe.
which is vastly better than it ending up in nature or in a landfill, incineration with collection of the waste heat is effectively just the worst form of recycling.
I rip those off out of spite
Attached cap prevents it from becoming a macroplastic
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.
Real ones get their micro plastics by chewing on used car tires.
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
