The caps was a problem yes. Not just littering, but also in sorting for recycling, where they'd often end up in the wrong place.

It obviously depends on where and how it's done, but the thing I've heard is that due to (the lack of) weight and size the bottle caps would end up in the paper badges, which would ruin the paper from being recycled. It's better if it follows the bottle. PET bottles (including caps) are shredded, washed and used for new bottles.

Same thing happened to the pull tabs on aluminium cans. Those used to be separate too.

That’s an EU regulation, not a corporate measure. And it has drastically decreased the amount of littered bottle caps, so a good thing.

you should only be allowed to buy cigarettes if you can account for all your ciggy butts or pick-up an equal amount.

Those float in the sea, we don't want that iiuc. Is a different plastic too, way more valuable from a recycling perspective (in Argentina hospitals used to collect caps to melt and make toys for childrens)

Really? I never heard that before. What would they care about how their caps are? I can't see it having any impact on them at all. A lot of people got pissed about it when Coca Cola was one of the first to change the caps in line with the regulation, so if anything it hurt Coca Cola.

Also even though large corporations are almost always totally evil, it's not impossible for them to do something good as well. Probably not for the right reasons, but still, one thing doesn't exclude the other.

The only thing I can find in this direction is a letter from beverage companies (including coca cola) opposing these measures. But that's based on a very shallow google search, so take it with a grain of salt. Where can I find info about what coca cola lobbied for or against?

Can you show a link that supports that? Because I distinctly recall these companies opposing this measure.

it costs coca cola more to produce those attached caps than not, are you saying coca cola was pushing for saving the environment? lol

It's an EU regulation meant to battle bottle caps being a major problem for marine wild life, where bigger sea mammals and fish swallow them and suffocate from it. Why are you lobbying for mega corporations willingly and for free? Did you hit your head as child one time too many?

It reduces littering by bottles to around half, just because we count the pieces differently now.

Beyond the statistics, collecting bottles seems easier than collecting bottle caps. Since people can't stop tossing their trash in the street, at least it makes it easier for people that clean up to get them.

Ofc it is, but stupid fucks have to complain about mundane shit

Also, the caps separated from the bottle fall through dinky cracks easier, like street drain covers) and get lost easier (or drop out of the bottom of the bin easier, etc.), being attached to the large bottle makes that more difficult to occur.

Do you know that these caps can be overextended? They have a second open position, where they are opened at ~180°. At that position they don't flop back closed and are quite well out of the way.

Yeah, the big problem is that each of these steps takes monumental effort while yielding only very little result.

At the current pace, new areas of plastic waste generation are added much faster than old areas are removed.

While we were busy banning plastic straws and plastic bags and stuck the cap onto the bottle, the plastic garbage production industry added thousands new types of unrecyclable products.

while technically true it's not accurate, the real reason to attach the cap is simply that we don't fucking want bottlecaps strewn about everywhere.

Or ... you can just hold the cap to a side instead of directly on your nose ...

Yeah, I know, but that doesn't lend itself to comments that get upvotes, and I'm a slag for it.

Sometimes they're harder to close

That last sentence is pulling a whole lot of weight there, there are so many bad implementations out there it's just stupid.

Also why the hell does this extend to all bottles, what is the point of a milk carton having this mandatory. (Pure coincidence, but most milk packaging I've come across after the change falls in the 'bad implementation' category)

from what i can tell it's like half a percent of a percent of people who give a singular thought to it beyond "oh they changed it"

The cap and the bottle in soft drinks are made of PET. Most deposit schemes will accept plastic (PET), or aluminium and a machine will separate and sort the material into the appropriate bin. Cans get melted down, plastic is stripped, washed, turned into pellets and fed back into hoppers that make new bottles. Because it's all the same plastic material it can be ground up into pellets and fed back into a machine to make new bottles. The biggest issue is probably that caps are usually black, red, blue or whatever so I imagine somewhere in the process the chopped up plastic goes past cameras that sort fragments by colour.