Mildly Infuriating

To governments:

Plastic tax.

EU Directive 2019/904

Under the Directive, drinks will only be allowed to be sold in plastic containers if the cap remains attached to the container

My city is awesome and recently decided to just stop recycling glass. You know, because we love plastic and why would we want to reward companies who use glass, the much easier thing to reuse and recycle.

Why would they? There's no financial reason for them to do so. Whatever they do, you are to blame for consuming. It's not them wrapping everything in plastic it's you who didn't recycle. Screw the fact there is no recycling containers around where you live.

PET bottles are actually the most recycled or their plastic upcycled. But yeah, needs to die.

I don't understand why soft drinks are even sold in plastic bottles anymore. Cans work perfectly fine. Sure you might want to re-seal the lid or something but if that's the case just buy a reusable drink container.

Microplastic is mostly tires and fishing nets so tax those first I think.

Attaching the caps to the bottles fixes a problem.

The lost fishing gear is another problem.

Fixing one will not fix the other. Fixing one helps. Fixing both helps more.

Its the same with the paper straws while disposable electronic cigarettes are still allowed, which not only contain plastics, but also electronics and a rechargeable lithium cell.

All the while a reusable vape works just as well, while paper straws just suck and they even contain plastic as well.

Even better. All the bottling and filling machine manufacturers could sell expensive upgrade packages for the beverage companies to even be able to work with the new caps. In our case we even had to completely retire two older machines because there are incompatible and buy new ones. Great for the environment for sure.

It was a very common plastic to be found on beaches. So they wanted to tether it to prevent garbage shit in the ocean.

https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC108181

Top categories of litter on EU beaches (table pdf page 81): #1 and 2 large and small plastic/polysterine pieces 14.90 and 13.83%, #3 strings and cords 13.75%. #4 cigarette butts 6.14%, #5 cough "Plastic caps and lids (drinks, chemicals, detergents (non-food), unidentified) / plastic rings from bottle caps/lids" 5.27%.

Bottles are a way smaller category so by tethering the caps you should get rid of all the caps without a bottle. There's then another impact assessment (please don't ask me for a link) looking at impact on the bottling industry and beverage market and it was deemed negligible, so Brussels went ahead and mandated tethered caps, comes into force in July.

This isn't a question of "is the impact of the regulation big or small" but "do the pros of regulation outweigh the cons", and they do. We're not in the US over here.

You can, but there's enough plastic to make it non-trivial, particularly if you don't want to risk destroying the cap.

They definitely mess with your muscle memory, both when opening it, and drinking from it.

Bottle caps stay tethered to the bottles when bottles are taken in for recycling. They don’t end up on the ground.