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.
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.
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.
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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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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”
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.
Cynicism, on the other hand - that’s always good.
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.
Can incubators not be made out of PET? why not accept and recycle the whole bottle?
I’ve seen one if these, so that is what they are for!
All EU representants right now 😱😱😱
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
I rip those off out of spite
