That’s an EU regulation, not a corporate measure. And it has drastically decreased the amount of littered bottle caps, so a good thing.
Littered bottle caps was a problem? Anyway, I hope they do cigarette filters next.
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.
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.
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.
An EU regulation that was heavily lobbied for by Coca Cola.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
Overextend the cap and turn it so it goes sideways. It doesn’t have to point at your nose at all.
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.
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.
Cynicism, on the other hand - that’s always good.
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…
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.
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 end up dribbling because the lid gets in my way, but it’s fine because I’m helping to offset the pollution caused by a billionaire’s private jet.
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
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.
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…
I rip those off out of spite
