Plastic bottle tops

In what way are lids contextually relevant?
Mixing in completely irrelevant stuff is a telltale of people putting lipstick on a pig.

I think possible people who open a plastic bottle of drink to drink whilst walking along may just drop the lid on the ground but I wouldn’t have ought it would be that many people.

I like the tethered caps though so I’m not complaining.

Irrelevant? It’s the main reason for the introduction of retained bottle caps:

Marine life can mistake brightly colored plastics like bottle caps for food. Caps can be ingested and pose a major choking and toxicity hazard to marine life . This problem is so severe that plastic bottle caps are classified among the top 5 most deadly marine debris items for sea life.

Here

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The orange juice bottle I bought today has two latches holding the top! (Last time there was only one but I don’t buy it often).

Guess I have to be happy, they are not on opposite sides :rofl:

It has now hit tetra! And the way the spout is placed on that half-liter tetra, I could hardly get to my tomato juice. Ridiculous.
I suspect they just want to push sales on scissors.

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No, they want to reduce plastic pollution by keeping the lid firmly attached to the container.

Once you have opened it, pour with the opening on top which allows air to enter smoothly and avoid splashing.

I don’t see what the problem some adults are having with these cap retainers.

On the Tetra packs, you can swivel the cap around the opening so it’s not in the way.

Perhaps Migros Klubschule could run a course to teach people how to open a bottle with the new caps?

I don’t get it either, it’s a minor inconvenience at most.

Because not all of them do swivel out of the way and stay there. Plus they’re just annoying. I cut them off, but still make sure the lids are on them when I throw them into my recycling bin. As usual the majority of people suffering because some idiots can’t be bothered to put a lid back on their bottle. :zany_face:

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Children in Gaza are suffering.
People in Ukraine are suffering.

Shall we try and act like adults and give things a bit of perspective?

exactly. Nanny-state fans must be delighted.
And it is unhygienic, constantly holding that top out of the way, it touching the outside of the container which has travelled miles and miles and been touched by more people than one can count.
Should anybody drink out of the bottle, that thing will strike their face all the time - but that can easily be solved by using a plastic straw, right?

There are wars going on but sorry, the EU is busy regulating important things. Let’s just be glad they solved the lid problem for those who don’t know that a lid with a thread can be screwed back on. Numerous times.

Always looking for a good thing in stupidity: We now know exactly what fluids have been imported or are produced for export as well as home requirements. We don’t export Swiss milk, for example.

It’s a typical case of Parkonson’s Law: tackle a minuscule and largely irrelevant detail because you’re overwhelmed with the actual problem so you can still feel good and bang your chest. It’s the same with the ban on plastic straws and the push against the light plastic bags while almost every little bit is now packed in plastic (except produce).

Roxi proves again that she/he doesn’t understand the problem.

This is why we need laws like this. Because of people like you.

It’s plastic bottle tops, drinking straws and so on which are easily discarded end up on Europe’s beaches.

The river Rhine starts in Graubuenden in the Swiss Alps, and flows down through Switzerland, through Germany and entering the North sea at Rotterdam.

It has been shown that plastic rubbish (plastic bottle tops, drinking straws and so) entering the sea, have entered this and other rivers throughout the whole of their course.

Of course, Switzerland is the only European country not to ban plastic straws.

Come on Switzerland, accept some responsibilities for your actions!!!

It is quite ridiculous.
Neuchâtel had plans to ban them from 2019 but faced legal challenges to their decision as apparently such things need to be decided at federal level. Why they’re not doing anything at federal level is beyond me.

All the events organised here now do have a ban on single use plastic though and it’s worked really well so far. They have a deposit based system of reusable crockery, glasses and cutlery.

I was just reminded of another annoying feature of these tops - they sometimes don’t go on straight, leaving you with a leaky bottle if you put it on its side. Or worse, I was just rinsing out a bottle, splash some water in it, put top back on, shake, and get it all over the place. Grrr.

As for necessity, I’ve commented before that I could never understand anybody taking the top off and throwing it away separately, just bizarre to me. But I have to accept that apparently it’s not just a few people who do/did it. Those people are the target of my complaint, having made it necessary in the first place.

A previous post described the new tops as ‘Mildly irritating’, as if that in some way disallows us from whinging about it. Just because there’s other worse things in the world doesn’t stop me from being pissed off by little things as well.

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Accordig to Perplexity, between 96% (NL) and 98% (DE) of the recycled bottles had their caps on before the EU directive became effective. But the fact that the cap is missing in a few rare cases does not in any way indicate that the cap got dumped into a river. Clearly, people interested enough to reycle the bottle are highly unlikely to dump the caps in the river, at worst they become part of the general waste.

To those however who can’t be bothered with recycling the tether won’t make the slightest difference.

What you will find mostly touted is data on bottles found as litter. But obviously that in itself is a big filter, and moreover nobody can tell you how much of the total that is. And the effect a tether makes in those cases is yet another question, clearly the tether will not affect the recycling behavior by one single bit.

Well my Perplexity trumps yours…

Plastic bottle caps and lids are significant contributors to Europe’s plastic waste, which totals nearly 26 million tonnes yearly. Caps have been among the most common litter items on European coastlines, including the North Sea, Baltic, and Mediterranean, where they can constitute up to 14% of shore waste. The tethering approach is designed to avoid caps being lost into the environment and to align with the broader EU goal of a circular economy where materials are reused and recycled efficiently.

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I don’t know about the Netherlands but in Germany you get money for returning pet bottles. So all they actually needed to do is pay nothing for bottles without lids …

Years ago when I shopped in Germany regularly I figured I might as well get money back (on drinks that already were much cheaper than here, crazy world) but the machine did not accept my bottles. Out of principle I complained and the guy went in the back and knew exactly how many bottles I had thrown into the machine. I was impressed. Turned out only mine were reliably squeezed before putting the lid on - Swiss “rule” :rofl:
Which by the way was also the reason the machine didn’t accept/count them.

I like that this AI-thingy is called perplexity. At least they’re honest … :wink:

No idea what this Perplexity is, AI I assume, but I might be slightly more convinced if the quote actually included some firm numbers. ISTR that when I raised this question last year someone did come up with some real data, which convinced me (reluctantly) that there was actually a problem to be addressed.

Edit: just re-read it, and in fact no, nobody posted anything with real number, just links to other articles with vague quotes like those repeated here.

The caps and lids are washed down storm drains and from there into the lakes, rivers and ultimately the sea.

The bottles themselves are too big for this.

It’s got nothing to do with the bottle recycling.