Corporations are saving the planet!
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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.
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That's an EU regulation, not a corporate measure. And it has drastically decreased the amount of littered bottle caps, so a good thing.
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.
Also it means recycle schemes get a % boost because a lot more bottles come back for recycling with their caps. I wouldn't be surprised if the cap is 10-20% of the total plastic in a bottle so caps were missing then that's wasted opportunity.
I remember as a kid when ring pulls on case used to detach and that's the same thing too. I remember my dad metal detecting on the beach and he'd recover dozens of ringpulls because people just tossed them.
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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.
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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.
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Lots of nestle simps in this threat
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True for all Euro places that I have been to that had deposits
Edit: apparently not, i take everything back
Not in Belgium, they've been dragging their feet for years on this by now.
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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...
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If you keep pushing it further open it has a detent that will hold it open far enough that even my big nose won't touch it... It's an amazing design, better than a screw cap in every way. Well, at least the properly designed ones.
Or ... you can just hold the cap to a side instead of directly on your nose ...
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And they also force people to buy plastic bottles? That is so mean.
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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"
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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.
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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.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]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.
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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.
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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.
i definitely saw ads from e.g. coca cola for a while, but they were more like sponsored PSAs saying "hey, lids are going to be attached from now on! just flip it to the side and it'll stay there. neat, huh?"
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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.
I get what you're trying to say about homeless people, and there are many people reliant on collecting plastic bottles in Germany too, but motivation in that context sounds a tad off imo
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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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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.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Not only that, but the plastic in the cap is actually made of plastic that is better recyclable than the rest of the bottle.
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Do like Japan with ammunition. You have to turn in your spent cases to buy more.
exactly where i got the idea
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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.
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.
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In Australia they have something called "report a tosser" people who are proven to have littered anything from cigarette buds to plastic bottles and more will be fined to hell and back.
Imagine the power of combining this tosser initiative with the revenue sharing aspect of New York's vehicle idling program. Save the planet and get paid all at the same time.
