If you can't outright solve a problem you shouldn't try to improve the situation >:(
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.
Do people only throw away the caps?
Well yes, many throw caps and bottle separately and the people that throw their trash anywhere will certainly not care about the caps.
make it mandatory that companies recycle their own waste.
Lol.
In what country is it mandatory for companies to recycle soda cans ?
Germany, actually lol
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.
Sweden.
Denmark lol
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:
this image (branding removed)
Whereas the existing design is similar to the old pull tabs that were on cans which caused ecological damage when people discarded them on the ground.
I wish they'd instead go after the big companies doing the majority of the damage, but I suppose this's where the cards lay. (For now)
I think its easily solvable you just make it mandatory that companies recycle their own bottles and they WILL find a way to make it cheap.
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The parks in my area have far more bottle caps on the ground than bottles
Or just introduce the Pfand system Europe wide
Pant is great.
It sucks so much to not be able to throw cans into recycling and be done with it.
Every week or so I carry some stinky bag of beer cans to these machines and I hate it.
Other countries should not be forced to implement this.
unfortunately yes, i've seen lots of just caps thrown around as litter
Soda cans have lots of plastic in them.
What? Soda Cans are made of aluminum, aren’t they?
They need a liner on the inside mostly epoxy or polymer.
Ah I thought only paper products needed an inner coating like that. Is there a concern of it oxidizing or something?
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.
They have a plastic lining to stop the soda from tasting like metal.
Bummer. I guess glass it is then.
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.
It was sarcasm
If you cannot stop the bleeding, reduce it until you can
There's a reason the saying goes "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle"
Reducing comes first, then reuse what you can, and recycle what you can't.
Refuse > Reduce > Reuse > Repurpose > Recycle
5 Rs rule
Refuse is the worst possible word to use here, given its alternate meaning.
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.
Would you like a plastic bag for your shopping?
Refuse: No thanks.
Reduce: I'll take just 1 bag and stuff it all in there, don't need 2.
Repurpose: it's ok because I'll use this bag as a bin liner.
Curious. To me, reducing to zero is reducing still, so bringing my own cloth bag instead counts as "reduce" for me.
Thanks for your take, though!
Refuse: use/buy an alternative
Reduce: if you have to use it (or buy it), use /buy as little as possible / until there's an alternative
Oh, that's why every beverage now has these shitty caps. Worth it if it helps fight pollution tho
well, it is just annoying
I mean that's less stupid than "Paper Straws"
they are not paper?
Some of them are for sure.
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.
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.Netherland got them now on:
- Beer (crates)
- Big plastic bottles (±1,5L)
- Small plastic bottles
- Aluminium Soda Cans (Newest one)
It's called 'statiegeld' here and we got them as long as I can remember. It's is just recently it also covers the small plastic bottles and soda cans.
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.
Then I misremembered. My bad.
Am I the only one who loves the new cap design?
Yes youre literally the only one
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.
Another nonsensical bill. Add it to the pile.
If you can't handle a slightly different lid design, you're going to hate it when you have to actually make lifestyle changes for us to not all die.
I can handle it by circumventing the pointless change. Nice slippery slope you set up there tho.
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.
Not using plastic bags and doing your recycling. Planet saved. Thanks for illustrating my point perfectly.
Keeping the lid attached to the container. Planet saved. Thanks for illustrating my point perfectly.
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.
that explains why those all suddenly become attached
Ah so that’s why all caps suddenly suck :/. stubbornly pulls cap off of the bottle
my biggest pain in 2023…
Every cap should just be like those water bottle caps that pop up and down, and then use less plastic by making them unremovable.
Making them unremovable would use more plastic. A lot of people reuse those sports cap bottles.
Wouldn't that prevent people from refilling the bottles?
No. It just prevents the lid to get "lost".
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.
Oh maybe I haven't looked into it. I just had some bottles with fixed cap and talked from my user experience.
Can imagine it must be a pain to use.
Honestly it is fine.
Yes. And it's also a hinderance when you want to pour it into a glass.
