I’m still flabbergasted that neither France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria nor Poland have Pfand (aka a money back deposit thing) for plastic bottles. It’s such an integrated part of my life, that I wonder why other countries haven’t adopted it.
Yeah I live in US and there are people around here going around picking out of people’s trash for cans and plastic bottles probably to get the few cents that they’re worth.
What? I live in the Netherlands and we have had “statiegeld” (pfand) on plastic bottles for as long as I can remember. A couple of months back aluminium cans joined the party.
I think it’s about more than that. Where I love, the caps and bottles are made out of different plastics. Most recycling stations here only accept plastic bottles without their caps, because the caps cannot be recycled. Forcing the caps to be part of the bottle essentially forces it to be of the same plastic. Or that’s how I understand it at least, so the entirety of the bottle can be recycled, and so the unrecyclable caps don’t end up everywhere creating microplastics as they slowly break down.
My girlfriend can’t screw them back on properly so right now she only uses each drinks bottle once
I hate the things so much because they hurt to use, can’t really be used one-handed and also make it difficult to drink from the bottle because of the weird angles they implicate.
So I’ve been cutting the caps off and cutting the little limbs off and making what was previously one piece of plastic into three, which I obviously also hate doing.
In the past I would always screw the lid back on before binning it, either to trap the air out or for the sake of completeness, so in my particular case this policy is very much the worst of all worlds, I hope the data shows that I’m an edge case though if they’re passing it into law.
It’s fucking annoying and it’s completely backwards. The cap is constantly in the way when I try to pour the contents into a glass, so shit spills everywhere. I just snip the plastic umbilical cord with some scissors or rip the cap off.
It’s not pointless. It’s one step of many to get us off destructive products. You’re going out of your way to make it harder to recycle and to make it more dangerous for wildlife. Ideally you should have already been avoiding plastics, but I guess the government will have to drag you kicking and screaming into living sustainably and for the future. It sure would be great if people could take an ounce of personal responsibility for what needs to happen, so we don’t need slow government interventions that will be too little too late.
You have no idea about how I live and yet you make snide remarks, bold assumptions and complain about my apparent lack of “personal responibility”.
I barely ever use my car, I buy my fresh produce at the local farmer’s market, I reject plastic bags and take my backpack when shopping, I recycle plastics, glass, paper/carton, gardening waste in seperate containers.
So fuck right off with your dumbass lecture, you holier-than-thou twat.
Pasta straws for the win. They are much better than paper straws in that they’re still biodegradable and they don’t go limp after a few sips. Have been wondering if they pose a risk to people suffering from gluten allergies/intollerances.
This is because bottle caps are ordinarily too small to be useful recyclable material, as when separated they are hard to get together in enough quantity.
While attached to the bottle, they should be viable recyclables.
Sadly, a very low percentage of plastic gets recycled anyway. In my country recycling company stats say only 10% - 20% of collected plastic is recycled. But the reality is much worse than that.
It turns out that nearly all of even that small percentage just gets shipped to a poor country for recycling because it’s too expensive to recycle here. Once it’s been shipped it’s considered “recycled” but since recycling is expensive the company receiving it just takes the money and quietly landfills it in their own country.
The reality is that plastic recycling barely happens at all.
What’s the difference between Refuse and Reduce here? I always took Reduce to mean using as little plastic as possible, which to m3 would include refusing the use of single-use plastics.
Same with Reuse and Repurpose: Reuse it however you can, regardless of its original purpose.
3 Rs has the rhetoric benefit of being a tricolon, which helps with keeping it concise and memorable.
How is this improving the situation. Do people only throw away the caps? I think this is just some stupid law so that they can say they tried. I still think soda cans are just a better solution and make it mandatory that companies recycle their own waste.
I still think soda cans are just a better solution
That actually sounds like a good idea to me, or you could make them similar in design to those water-bottles that have the cap meant to stay with the bottle, shown in:
Just to get this straight, in Germany if coca cola sells a can of coke to a consumer and that it is somehow returned to them through a deposit scheme or something they are legally bound to recycle entirely that aluminium foil ?
If that’s the case that’s amazing but in many countries in Europe a lot of effort is done to collect recyclable stuff but that certainly does not mean it will be recycled.
There is a vast difference between something being mandatory to put in the recycling bin and it actually being recycled for real.
Aluminum is poisonous in larger amounts and a lot of can contents are pretty acidic. You could probably line them with non reactive metals like gold, but thst would be very expensive in comparison.
Glass because the added weight ends up being less eco-friendly than plastics during transport. So it’s better to only get glass from local distributers. Also the recycling process of glass is fairly eco unfriendly too.
Aluminum cans might be the best we have for now. I have seen paper milk carton style containers come up more often. As well as plant based plastics.
What? Don’t be ridiculous. Of course you should still try to improve the situation. That’s like saying trucks that get 7MPG are bad for the environment but don’t bother making trucks that get 20MPG because it still runs on fossil fuels.
Europe has laws that recycling companies have to state how much % per weight ends up wherever. They charge you in Germany a deposit of ~15 cent per single use plastic bottle and you have to return it in mint condition in special recycling machines to get that money back. I’ve heard that Austria wants to make that 25 cent over there in 2025 - that’s 30% of what a bottle of water costs in a German Aldi.
I only buy salt that has flouride in it, and I make sure that guests can read the label from where they sit. I call it “Conspiracy Theorist Coverblower“. And I salt very little.
depends on your country, here in Mexico we don’t have tap water we need to buy water bottles or a water jug. I’m not sure why we don’t have tap water really 🤔
My local tap water is disgusting. A filter might make it safe to drink, but nothing makes it stop tasting gross. I’ll cook with it and drink it with flavoring but I won’t just drink it by itself.
Some places do have truely awful tap water even if it is technically drinkable. I’ve been places where the tap water reeked of sulphur and no filter would take out the taste short of an RO filter. We always had to buy drinking water there. At the same time though we always bought water in gallon jugs rather than the individual bottles.
PET is recycled as in: every supermarket has an drop off point, giving you back 25cnt for every large bottle, 15cnt for small and cans.
Plastic in the general garbage is separated (not 100%, but still) and either separated (polystyrene is easy to detect and seperate for instance) or sold to companies that repurpose them (more and more of those white triangle things in the corners of roads are repurposed strengthened plastics now).
I’m sure plenty will find its way to either landfill (that we don’t have much) or gets burnt. But it’s not as bad as the US, which was my point in the first place.
Yes, but now the soda bottles in that patch will have their caps attached. So that’s sort of, well, I suppose … you may have a point.
More seriously I’m fully convinced that this cap attachment nonsense is purely to save coca cola et. al. further costs in recycling bottles. Like it’s still a small step forward, but it wouldn’t happen if corpos weren’t saving a dime.
Another symbolic act so that they can pretend they did something for the environment and don’t have to actually tackle the major problems which could cut into profits of big companies.
Also anyone got fucked over by the bottle cap spinning in the way of the pour spilling drink all over the table?
No but I’ve had the “pull the cap away not realising it’s attached and pull the bottle of milk out of my hand, sending it crashing to the floor” thing, that was fun
And actually, it wouldn't surprise me if the extra spillage caused by this change (for me it's the new attached caps on tetra packs, like on plant milk) is by design, just another way to get us to buy more product more often because 20% of it now ends up on the counter..
At this point you are just incompetent at pouring in a drink
It’s a very easy change to make, yes the impact is small but why not take the easy stuff first? It’s not like the EU isn’t doing hard stuff as well (right to repair laws or gdpr anyone?)
Lmfao, go fuck yourself ableist bootlicker (so even if we ignore disabled people who have different abilities to you, like you already do, there is literally no impact, there is still the exact same amount of plastic being used, the only difference is a once easy to pour from box is no longer easy to pour from, but hey, isn't it so much easier blaming an individual than it is to acknowledge that you're getting fucked by companies that don't give a shit about neither you nor the planet? Clown)
This went from 20 to 100 real quick. While I agree with your point, I think it could be beneficial to everyone if you didn’t assume malice where ignorance is the more obvious motivator of the previous comment. I could be dead wrong and the person you replied to could indeed be an ableist bootlicker, but I lack the motivation to dive into their post history to find out. Just try and remember that aggression seldomly changes people’s minds and is more likely to cause them to dig in their heels and double down on their ignorant takes.
I can understand that being more difficult for anyone with disabilities. The point though was if it makes an impact for the environment and I’d still say it does, because to recycle you have to get the material back first and it being attached makes that more likely
Don’t know where the corpo bootlicker stuff is coming from, no company is benefitting off this?
Anyway I hope the rest of your day is going better than it did until now
Yeah like the paper straws through a plastic lid. The part that gets chewed and wet with digestive enzymes is some limp paper yet the simple lid can be as plastic as they want.
Supposedly these would end up on the street or somewhere else outside of the waste processing system. So they want you to throw the cap out together with the bottle
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