{"id":19262,"date":"2024-07-24T12:24:13","date_gmt":"2024-07-24T11:24:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/?p=19262"},"modified":"2024-07-28T12:44:01","modified_gmt":"2024-07-28T11:44:01","slug":"daily_3434_-_topic_of_the_year_bottle_caps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/2024\/07\/24\/daily_3434_-_topic_of_the_year_bottle_caps\/","title":{"rendered":"Daily: 3434 – topic of the year: bottle caps"},"content":{"rendered":"


\nThe current ever-recurring discussion topic: the new EU regulations about bottle caps that came into effect this year. My friends in Estonia didn’t need to say more than “bottle caps” for everyone to know *exactly* what they were talking about.<\/p>\n

If you’re not living in Europe, or if you’re future me and have forgotten, EU law now requires plastic bottle caps to be attached to the bottle (or milk carton, or other packaging). The bottle on the left is of the old type with a detached cap; the one on the right is of the new type.<\/p>\n

Environmentally-conscious and recycling-oriented as I am, I have never in conscious memory thrown a bottle cap on the ground. Or even dropped one and not picked it up. (Heck, I pick up other people’s litter when I’m out walking.) But I guess enough people do for this initiative to be worth the cost and effort of changing all production lines. I assume someone’s done the maths.<\/p>\n

Out of curiosity, I went looking for statistics. I found this report of a Dutch study of garbage found on beaches<\/a> which mentioned that “bottle caps are among the top 5 items found during beach cleaning and beach litter monitoring around the world”, and “research […] on beach litter over the last 12 years shows that on average, 19 bottle caps are found every 100 metres”. They also report numbers from other countries: “On average, the highest number of caps were found in Sweden (170\/100m)” – not because people litter more here, but because of sea currents converging here.<\/p>\n

But the new caps are annoying. Most are well-designed: you can twist them out of the way and they stay there while you pour or drink. But they are in my face when I drink. And turning a bottle upside down while drinking also turns the attached cap upside down, which sometimes leads to drips from the lid. Which matters little in the case of water, but I don’t want smoothie dribbles on my face. So now I have to inspect and possibly lick the cap before drinking my smoothie – or detach the cap after all, which is of course intentionally not easy.<\/p>\n

Drinks companies complained loudly of course, arguing that the new caps will require more material so the net effect will be negative. Innocent (who makes several of our favourite juices and smoothies) on the other hand managed to make their new bottle caps smaller than the old ones, so clearly it can be done if someone’s willing to make the effort.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The current ever-recurring discussion topic: the new EU regulations about bottle caps that came into effect this year. My friends in Estonia didn’t need to say more than “bottle caps” for everyone to know *exactly* what they were talking about. If you’re not living in Europe, or if you’re future me and have forgotten, EU […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,18,768],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current_affairs","category-dailies","category-photography-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19262"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19262\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19265,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19262\/revisions\/19265"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}