Plastic bottle tops

They’re known by several names – swing-top, flip-top, bail, and brace . The company that makes them calls them E-Z Cap. They’re popularly known as Grolsch bottles because the Grolsch brewery (located in Holland) continued to use them long after most everyone else started using crown caps.

In the past we have ordered mineral water (like Eptinger or Valser) that come in glass bottles with metal caps, but you have to return the bottles otherwise you pay for them.
It is a small indulgence, indeed. We don’t do it very often.

@3Wishes, your picture is actually exactly “Luft raus, Deckel drauf” (air out, lid on).

Interesting news about the milk bottles. If they carry on like that I’ll go back to childhood manners, off to the farmer with a little kettle. On the other hand, might be easier and safer to just buy a cow?

And while I am a convinced tap-water drinker, to those who find it necessary to criticize bottle-water drinkers: Move to Uster?

It’s not the first time this problem occures in Switzerland.

I have a guest at the moment who arrived with a six-pack of 1.5l bottles of Alpina water. She swears that tap water contains nasty minerals that will immediately make her face swell up, or something. And that filtering water also removes all the good minerals.

Our water up here in the mountains tastes absolutely great, slightly on the hard side such that I use a Brita for coffee machine and kettle, but not for drinking water.

Makes me laugh just a little bit, people want Alpine water but feel they have to buy it in the supermarket.

She also unplugs the wifi extender at night because, you know, electric in the air.

Anyway, far be it from me to judge, she’s a repeat paying guest, after all.

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Well, guests like that are good for your finances as I guess you charge neither water nor electricity separately.

As to Brita filters, nasty stuff. Guess if you cook the water after … still, not in my cup of tea.

Struggling to imagine how a water filter could be “nasty”, TBH. My cup of tea certainly tastes better with it than straight from the tap, and limescale buildup is massively reduced. Been using them for decades, particularly at our Alsace place where the tapwater is about 12/10 on the hardness scale.

You keep repeating that but we don’t get that here at all. There are a not insignificant number of people in Switzerland who don’t actually live in the German speaking part.

I have nothing against tethered caps, but I dislike designs where the cap is firmly attached to the bottle neck because it’s hard to put the cap back on.
image
The other day, my son was struggling with the cap and accidentally dropped the bottle. Fortunately, it only contained carbonated water.

The design with the small plastic strip is better, as it makes closing the bottle easier.
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The only downside is that the dangling cap may cause the pouring liquid to splash if it comes into contact with the cap.

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Ugh…we lived near Wiessembourg for years; all my whites turned gray, and calc was a drag on the shower heads occasionally. Beautiful country, though.

I’ve only seen the strip-type tethers around here–you pull on them, and they give you a decent length of plastic between the bottle and the top.

Yes Ma’am, I feel your pain. It’s the pain every Swiss feels regularly when the language barrier produces different campaigns for things.
I did put quiet an effort in finding the équivalent for you but learnt it’s hard to go back to the 90-ies on internet.
I can offer you, how they teach “you” to get the air out and put the lid on, with a picture instead of a slogan:


And the preferred slogan seems to bei:“Chaque bouteille compte!”

TIS. The campaigns for or against things are different in each part. Just like the “stop aids” campaign (even before the PET one) I’m sure was different too. Here it was “bim Siitesprung im Minimum en Gummi drum” and shocked the establishment :smile: There was even a song www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ek0_YXKIgt0
The link only works with copy/paste as I’m soooooo far off track now.
Although this thing with “put the lid on” seems to work on all subjects :rofl:

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Tap water is great here and we don’t use a filter, although we do have a Brita mug but honestly I like it more directly from the tap.
It’s hard to say if “filtered” water makes any difference to coffee, tea etc.
However, we do enjoy carbonated water and don’t buy it because the tap water contains “nasty minerals”. There’s a subtle difference (in taste) between carbonated mineral water and tap water that I don’t expect everyone to agree it exists… :slight_smile:

Btw, I drink bottled mineral water since for ever, back home is just normal and considered “healthy” due to the concentration of various minerals (depending on the springs where it has been captured).

But back to the “nasty caps” attached to the plastic bottles - I guess we’ll get used to these ones too.

I guess, but the picture I shared shows the lid clearly off and there’s no text.

This picture is better, because the lid is clearly on. :slight_smile:

Flight attendant had issues with that bottle top and sloshed a fair amount on me instead of in my glass.

Even here in Morgins where the water is not particularly hard we notice when the filter’s getting in need of replacement, which is a lot longer that recommended, by the staining in my wife’s teacups and the start of limescale in the kettle.

That’s funny as to me your picture makes sense as the air needs to be able to get out before you put the lid on, while the picture they use in the Romandie made no sense to me when I first saw it.
And there we think, pictures solve the language barriers.

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A sweet, sticky Schweppes?
Poor woman, was she en EU member at least (amendable to this bottle-law? :rofl:)

Even here, near to Nyon where we use lake water, we fill our Nespresso and Kettle with Britta filtered waters. I still need to descale them every other month. And we do have a water softner.

Article in FT about the new bottle top rules:

https://www.ft.com/content/e43c7099-6f8e-4196-8a14-ab11a2ed2695

  1. EU Regulation on Bottle Caps: Since July 3, all drink bottles up to three litres sold in the EU must have their caps tethered to the bottles. Although the UK is no longer part of the EU, British companies are also adopting these designs due to the unified nature of multinational supply chains.

  2. Environmental Motivation: The regulation aims to reduce plastic waste, particularly marine litter. Plastic caps and lids accounted for about 13% of marine litter caught by fishing vessels between 2011 and 2017.

  3. Industry Costs: Transitioning to the new caps was costly for the drinks industry. A report commissioned by the European soft drinks association, Unesda, estimated costs of up to 9% of the industry’s annual turnover due to the new equipment required. Ironically, the new tethered caps may use more plastic than the old ones.

  4. Standardization Issues: Some sectors, such as milk producers, argued for separate standards since their bottles don’t need to withstand pressure like fizzy drinks. However, they did not receive exemptions, and a uniform standard was applied across the industry.

  5. Supply Chain Bottlenecks: The transition to tethered caps caused a rush in demand, leading to supply chain bottlenecks. Some drink makers who previously produced caps in-house outsourced production to navigate the new standards.

  6. Design and Manufacturing Adjustments: The regulation spurred innovation, with some manufacturers using the opportunity to reduce plastic use by shortening bottle necks and caps. This shift allowed for optimization of product portfolios.

  7. Recycling Impact: Tethered caps improve recycling efficiency. Detached caps often fall through recycling machinery and end up burned or in landfills. When tethered, caps stay attached to bottles, allowing for better separation and recycling.

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… because any decent mother teaches her child (son? :smirk:) not to drink straight from the milk-bottle (I expected to read, knowing darn well that this is not the case).

So much to Brexit, huh? While these “leashes” showed up in Switzerland it seems it was only on import stuff? The Heidi-milk (definitely a plastic bottle) didn’t have it last week, the butter-milk doesn’t have it and even the Cola I allowed myself last week didn’t have it.

TBH I’m astonished by the litter thing. I didn’t think anyone would discard the tops separately from the bottles. Clearly I was wrong.

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