Yes I am aware that they're somehow supposed to reduce plastic waste because the cap can't get lost ... unless you cut it off, of course.
Yes I am also aware that there are people with disabilities (shaky hands, weak grip, etc.) who are thankful for these and actually like the design. Good for them, and I mean that in a non-sarcastic way.
But personally, I hate these things with all the "first world problems" rage I can muster and go out of my way to rip / cut / twist them off on every single bottle I buy. I don't like having the bottle cap directly in my face while drinking, or slipping in the way of the flow whenever I just want to pour milk, and on more than one occasion, I've actually cut my finger OR lip on these little sh*ts (not the same type as in the picture, but baldy-made longer "bands" that leave little plastic spikes on the cap and/or band).
No idea whether I should post this in the "unpopular opinion" section instead or if other people think the same, but to me, "mildly infuriating" describes them perfectly.
Pretty much.
Whenever I see these type of posts I can only think of some cavemen failing to figure out the most simple contraption. Those caps are literally not a problem at all, assuming you're not a complete moron.
Its often the little things like this that make it clear for me who is indeed a moron.
Like oh, omg, that explains so much about that person.
That poor thing.
Now, I def need to not equate that with 'capabilities' of someone, even morons can brute-force achieve things I could never. They do it despite the handicap and I respect that.
Dont want to discuss problems or brainstorm when them but respect nonetheless (them and their work).
Most of us are in fact not what it's commonly considered neurotypical (I beehive they are a smol but just the most vocal group). And just like with folk on introverts/depressed/ADHD/autism/etc spectrum it's best to recognise, acknowledge, respect, and adapt to that (ie work and communicate a bit differently with each one of us, it doesn't take all that much, and the learning curve is just so unbelievably good at the start).
You're coming up with a sarcastic exaggeration (barrels and glasses), followed by "serious question". So which is it now?
Anyway. How about refillable cups, travel mugs, returnable bottles? Stop buying bottled water if your tap water is fine. Get a soda maker if you like sparkling water or Spritzer.
Clean up after yourselves, return or throw away bottles with the lid on.
And first and foremost: stop buying packaged and bottled sh*t at every possible occasion. Things like single-use / to-go cups or bottles shouldn't even exist.
We all created the landfills and ocean garbage patches and now we complain about our own stupidity, unable to drink from a bottle with a lid attached to it like we're toddlers.
If you seriously ask me for an alternative: stop creating waste. Stop complaining about your waste.
And stop complaining about regulations that try to limit waste that shouldn't even be there.
Big part of the problem stems from our own laziness and consumerism. Everyone is part of the problem, nobody wants to be a part of the solution. What did you even expect?
Caps attached to the bottles is very important to the recycling industry, so they can be more cheaply and efficiently shipped to China and thrown into the sea.
Source on that? As far as I know China stopped importing plastic waste as they realized it was too expensive for the state as they are burdened with the externalities, i.e. cleanup.
I think a few years ago it was China. Now it will be anybody else who wants Western money and doesn't mind burning plastic. Malaysia and Turkey seem popular for the UK. Not sure where the US sends it. It sure as shit isn't recycled in any way that people would think of as recycling.
I've no idea why we make plastic bottled drinks when aluminium cans exist.
This generalization is a problem. Assessing the whole life cycle, the carbon footprint of glass bottles is problematic and plastics is a viable alternative.
You have to consider the significantly higher weight of glass increasing carbon emissions from transportation.
While plastics bottles can only be reused about half as often as glass bottles, their production is far more energy-efficient (glass production is done at temps of 1400-1600 °C or 2500-3000 °F while plastics use temperatures from 160-300 °C or 320-600 °F) which also reduces carbon footprint in basically every country.
Of course recycling has to be taken seriously and properly organized to prevent plastics just ending up in nature. But we have to balance the micro-plastics problem against climate change. We need to solve both.
It used to be done a lot more before and some places still do it in Europe. You return the glass bottle intact, they reuse it as is. Only carbon spent is in transporting it.
You have to consider the significantly higher weight of glass increasing carbon emissions from transportation.
If the transportation was electrical renewable sourced this wouldn't be a factor.
their production is far more energy-efficient (glass production is done at temps of 1400-1600 °C or 2500-3000 °F while plastics use temperatures from 160-300 °C or 320-600 °F)
If manufacturing was electrical renewable sourced this wouldn't be a factor.
I don't want micro plastics in my nutsack. I don't care that it'll be a long time before we get there. We should start getting there now. I don't want to hear perfectionist fallacy arguments about why I should be happy to have plastics swimming around with my sperm.
I absolutely agree. Sadly alot of smaller nations get payed to dispose and recycle and then just throw the trash into the ocean. There are even areas that just have no trash disposal system in place other than the local rivers.
You can rotate the bottle before taking a sip to position it such that the cap doesn't hit your face. You can also pour liquid out of the bottle without having it run into the cap using the same rotation technique before pouring.
I had quite some beef with the tethered caps in the beginning when they didn't latch properly, but have since gotten used to them. That said:
Cap on top -> Funny hat for nose!
Cap on bottom -> Beard gets to take a moist nap.
Cap on sides -> Mustache also gets to take a sip!
Obviously not much of a problem. I'd need to clean my facial hair either way if eating ice cream or other messy foods, but cap rotation might not be effective if your "face" sticks out 1-2cm from your mouth.
One could also attempt to rotate the cap in a way to achieve quantum tunneling, but I don't feel that I've achieved that level of "tethered cap proficiency" yet.
You can rotate the bottle before taking a sip to position it such that the cap doesn't hit your face.
And gravity will make the cap spin around, hit your face, get in the way of the liquid, and make it splash everywhere but your mouth.
You can also pour liquid out of the bottle without having it run into the cap using the same rotation technique before pouring.
Same issue. As soon as you tip the bottle the cap will spin (apparently whatever genius designed this useless annoyance didn't realise that bottle necks are cylindrical), get in the way of the liquid, and make it spill everywhere but the container you're trying to pour it into.
They're like a Pythagorean cup without the temperance lesson and well thought out design.
The only way to use these without wasting 99% of the liquid and making a mess is to either awkwardly try to hold them up as you pour, or to violently rip them out before pouring in an entirely justified fit of righteous rage.
What an utterly infuriating waste of plastic, time, and money.
Does america have terrible bottle designs or something? Not one single bottle with tethered cap has ever freely spun, you can move it and it stays in that position
Y'know how you hold the bottle with your hand to lift it? Believe it or not, you can hold it by the neck, and even slightly touching the little plastic ring the cap is tethered to will keep it from spinning.
You can go to your local farmer. They usually don't bother selling you some milk. Bring your own bottle for them to fill it up. Also, its usually much cheaper than everything you can buy elsewhere. If you want to be sure you don't get sick you can cook the milk(but this causes a loss in taste), but you can also drink it without cooling it. You might get sick the first (few) times, but you will get used to it and won't get sick from drinking raw milk.
That's fine in some places. However, a lot of the US has contaminated drinking water due to lead mines. They mines are long closed but lead is everywhere. I don't have to worry but I know people who have had there entire yards replaced due to lead.
I honestly like them. Those that "stay open", of course... They just stay out of the way, never get lost, and works pretty nice.
At first I disliked them, but quickly found out they are actually... Very practical. Even not considering the "green" twist, why didn't we adopted them before?
They should make it so the cap doesn't come off at all, so you have to buy a glass bottle with a metal cap that are both recyclable and won't give you erectile disfunction.
Guess I've gotten used to them. At the beginning I'd just rip the cap off anyways, but now somehow managing though I do buy this sorta bottles rather rarely nowadays.
ANYWAYS I don't understand why so many products come in plastic bottles, or carton box with a fucking plastic cap. Aluminum cans are great, cartons are great, glass bottles are great. Why plastic???
I've also just given in but I gotta say: what the heck is wrong with people that they can recycle the bottles but somehow throw the caps anywhere in nature? How long do you leave your brain in the microwave each day before that behaviour becomes normal? People suck.
The whole thing is about bottle caps found on beaches. I assume people just lose track of them, you might put it down on your beach towel and then something moves and a second later it's in the sand getting buried.
They're also in Germany now, as mandated in every EU country, but I don't have to deal with them because there's also a heavy culture of reusable glass bottles (Mehrweg Flaschen) distributed in standard reusable crates. Everything has a deposit so you always bring them back when refilling.
I don't mind them either but get yourself cheap cable pliers and cut the tether when you need to, or pour into a cup instead of drinking from the bottle.
Maybe they make them better here in Denmark. Plus we have "Pant" where you pay more for the bottles but get money back when you return them so it's a "belt and braces" approach I guess!
The place I lived before this would only recycle the bottle, not the cap⊠made this mildly infuriating as I had to do extra work every time I wanted to recycle them. Glad I can just toss the whole thing in the recycle bin now.
The bottle itself is usually made of PET which is very recyclable. The cap is made of polypropylene for its strength to prevent the bottle from leaking.
You cannot recycle PET and PP together - you need pure resin for production. So this captive closure actually hinders recycling.
Personally, I've never seen many caps lying around without their bottle and think the EU solved a non-existent issue.
That's what I thought, too. I'm sure it's a problem SOMEWHERE, but did we just get slapped with a global solution to a locally inexistent issue?
I've heard that there's a measurable effect, though, even in Europe, so I guess it's okay. The extent of that effect? Probably comparable to non-plastic straws. Meaning almost none, just political.
Right, the previous place required them to be removed because theyâre different plastics. I assume the new one just automatically cuts the top of the bottle off and discards it⊠probably because the people using the service couldnât be counted on to follow directions anyway. In fact that was the reason they actually gave up on city wide recycling. Too many people trying to throw non-recyclable items in the bin (like whole ladders and baby seats and greasy pizza boxes and all sorts of stuff.) They had a line literally catch fire because someone threw a lithium ion battery in the bin.
I'm not sure how they're doing it but in Germany all those PET bottles go into a centrally-managed recycling stream (because 25ct deposit) and I bet they have some technical norms around that kind of stuff. The bottles are all crushed to save space, incl. the caps, which at least in the case of the water bottle next to me is HDPE. Judging by the haptics the label is PET, a flimsy banderole glued (fused?) on at the seam.
Either they're doing it chemically by breaking up the PET and then fishing out the rest from the soup (is that possible?) or what would also work I guess is shredding and mechanical sorting -- the label is flimsy, the bottle always transparent, the cap never transparent. Such stuff.
Normally/averagely abled people - how is any configuration of the cap an issue?
To even think about it takes more energy than any obvious solution (like holding the bonded cap whilst drinking or not ripping it off the seal ring in the non-bonded versions).
Is it just because we are old and any change is annoying af?
The issue I had with them at first was that I thought you had to rip it off halfway, then it was annoying as hell, but if you just unscrew it and fold it open untill it locks open it works great!
To close you just have to pull it up slightly to get it over the opening and then srew it closed
my dad is disabled. had a stroke, shaky hands & stuff forever. he fuken h8's these new caps. i personally don't care much, unless i'm drinking yoghurt out of a bottle.
I pick up street litter, and having picked up thousands of pounds, I have never felt that loose caps are a problem, let alone one that requires such a solution. The number of littered bottles, with or without a cap, is greater than the number of loose caps, and the amount of plastic in every bottle dwarfs the plastic in a cap. Fixing the cap to the bottle will do nothing to improve the recycling rate of plastic if entire bottles are already tossed anyway.
I consider the idea of cap tethers as adversarial memetic warfare thrust upon us for some unknown ulterior purpose, possibly to make us hate the very idea of environmental consciousness. Same as paper straws. I like plastic bag bans though.
As far as picking litter is concerned, I personally prefer finding bottles without a cap. At least those are empty, all liquid having evaporated after the bottle has spent several months in the bushes. The capped bottles are often half-full and are just nasty. (Who even pays for a bottle of drink and not drinks half of it anyway?)
The number of littered bottles, with or without a cap, is greater than the number of loose caps,
That smells like survivorship bias. Your dataset is skewed by loose caps being way harder to find due to being smaller. It stands to reason that all those bottles without a cap you find will have also had their cap littered in the vast majority of cases.
Yeah, I concede that small caps are more likely to be carried away by rainwater than whole bottles :D. What I meant was that for every loose cap on the ground there is a bottle lying around somewhere, and also there are bottles with caps on. No one is tossing their cap into the bushes and then taking the bottle to the recycling center.
This is one of the dumbest things I've seen. What even is the point? This is just so dumb. Maybe you could break off the cap?
If you are worried about environmental impact ts they could just make them out of aluminum. We already have aluminum cans. Adding more plastic to the bottle will just create more waste.
The things that annoy us are things we are not used to. There are hundreds of things in your life that are equally annoying but since they have always been that way you don't notice them. That's why babies are the way they are. Everything us new and annoying.
I had the same instinct to tear them off but I told myself to not be a toddler and just got used to it within a week.
Seriously, in the end it boils down to this: "I hate these things with all the "first world problems" rage I can muster ".. Don't you guys have other problems in your life? There you are, raging against a bottle cap.
Like another poster said and showed with a picture before: the cap can be tucked in at the side and voilĂ ! Drinking can be done as it used to be..
How to say this in a non aggressive, non condescending wayâŠ
You're stupid.
The thing stay open and out of the way. If it's in your face when you drink from the bottle, it means you lack the ability to rotate a loose plastic ring 90° (or even the whole bottle). If it's in the way of your pour, same thing.
They are as unobtrusive as it gets; and you going out of your way (with rage, it seems) to do something tedious like forcibly ripping them off or cutting yourself on smooth plastic instead of looking at it and moving it, effortlessly, in any position that would not hinder you, is the paramount of silliness.
Could you explain the relevance? I asked why people don't carry a tool for a problem they are bitching about. Phones have nothing to do with a tethered cap.
AFAIK, these tethered caps are mostly an EU thing (and at the very least are not widely used in my area of the US) and a lot of European countries are less knife-friendly than the US.
I think that's mostly UK and France. As in: I have an Opinel lying around here, perfectly legal to carry in any situation as long as it's not a protest or such, it's a French knife, lots of tradition behind it... and it's illegal in France.
Rules in Germany are quite simple: If the blade is longer than IIRC 14cm (palm of your hand), or it is a locking blade that's designed to be opened with one hand, you need a good reason to carry it. Like, walking on the street towards the forest with an axe over your shoulder is fine because you have a proper reason, into a mall, not so much. Butterflies and some other one-handed opening mechanisms popular with notorious people are outlawed. Fixed blades with certain features, say, guards or more than one edge, are rightly classed as bladed weapons which you generally need to keep at home. Everything else is a tool you can EDC, and the only thing you need to buy a sword is your ID to show that you're 18.