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
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 they’re 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 couldn’t 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.
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.
Well, you also have to clean them which I assume also uses energy. And they need to be fulfilling “food-grade” cleaning requirements since you want to drink out of them, so that’s probably more energy needed than a simple wash in soap.
Yes (I actually live in Europe), but it cannot be reused indefinitely and needs to be recycled after about 50 uses (that’s why I mentioned the whole life cycle of a bottle). Also, glass breaks.
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 don’t want to hear perfectionist fallacy arguments
You mean like the ones you gave if there was a 100% renewable power grid and transportation was 100% electrical glass would be carbon neutral?
Well, both aren’t and we are a long way from either, so that argument stands. You may care about your nutsack, as do I about my own, but climate change is the more critical problem.
Have you ever heard about the Exota affair in the Netherlands? In 1969, journalists uncovered the glass bottles of Exota soda were explosion hazards and their scathing TV episode about it drove the company to bankruptcy. It became a whole ordeal after the journalists and broadcaster were sued.
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.
A lot of us don’t think of our knives as weapons, they’re tools.
It’s rare that I don’t carry a knife, and using it in self defense is the furthest thing from my mind every day when I put it in my pocket. I use it for things like opening packages, cutting string, sharpening pencils, use various other tools on the knife like screwdrivers, pliers, awls, I have a lot of outdoor hobbies like camping, hiking, fishing, and knives are kind of indispensable for those pursuits.
If I’m ever in a situation where I absolutely need to defend myself, and I don’t really foresee that ever being necessary, I’m probably not even going to think of using my knife in self defense, I don’t think of it as a weapon anymore than I think of my wallet being a weapon, it’s just something that lives in my pocket that I frequently need to use.
And knives make a shitty weapon, if you’re close enough to stab someone, you’re close enough to get punched in the face, or for your assailant to wrestle it out of your hands and stab you with it. You’d be better swinging around pretty much any larger object within arms reach to create some space. They say about knife fights that the loser dies in the street, the winner dies in the ambulance.
The knives I tend to carry especially aren’t good weapons, most need 2 hands to open, aren’t really designed ergonomically as fighting knives, most are fairly small so I’d have to get really lucky to hit anything vital and would probably just piss them off more and not stop the attack quickly, some of them don’t even have a pointy blade so not good for stabbing (I actually make it a point to choose less threatening looking knives for my EDC needs) some of them don’t lock open so they’d just as like close on my fingers as cause any harm to my assailant, and some of them actually lock in the closed position so definitely not good for a weapon.
I’m not saying that everyone who carries a knife has the same mindset. Lots of people do carry them as weapons, those people are idiots. And not everyone puts the same thought into the knives they carry and just get something that looks cool whether or not it’s functional for their needs.
I also don’t carry anything for self defense regularly and don’t own a gun (not opposed to gun ownership in general, but my thoughts on that are part whole ‘nother debate,) in general if I feel like I need to be prepared to defend myself if I go somewhere, I just don’t go there. There’s a bit of privilege to that, since I live in a safe area and can make that call, not everyone is lucky enough to live somewhere they can feel safe. The only exception is the pepper spray I keep with my dogs leash, since my wife or I often end up walking her alone at night, and that’s more of a precaution against loose dogs, coyotes, etc. than against people.
There’s a lot to say about Americans’ love of violence and weapons and the sort of mindset we have about self defense, and overall I tend to think that a lot of my country is absolutely insane when it comes to those matters. That said, I also think people who look at the little swiss army type knives, or Leatherman multitools I tend to carry and see a terrifying deadly weapon have their own issues to work out too.
Not really relevant to the comment you replied to and only tangentially related to some other comments in this thread. We’re talking about knives and soda caps here.
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.
His formatting leaves a bit to be desired, but that basically boils down to
Knives with certain features like a double edge, a handguard, butterfly knives and certain other one-handed opening mechanisms (I assume switchblades, maybe assisted openers, possibly gravity and flick knives) are weapons and can be owned but generally not carried
Otherwise…
Knives (and I assume this applies to other bladed tools as well since he mentioned an axe)with a blade length of less than about 5.5 inches are ok to carry for no particular reason, as long as either the blade doesn’t lock or it needs two hands to open it (from how he wrote it sounds to me like one or the other of those features is ok, but not both)
You can carry a bigger knife if you have a good reason that you need one, like if you’re going campings/hunting, or clearing brush with a machete (and from how he phrased it sounds like you could also carry a one-handed locking knife with a good reason)
You get carded to prove you’re an adult if you want to buy a sword (I assume knives as well)
Which is pretty straightforward, and actually similar to a lot of laws in the states (looser than some states I believe, and stricter than others)
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.
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.
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?
I hardly want to reply for your aggressiveness. I don’t see how that’s been called for.
But yes, I was being serious because you explicitly excluded all bottles by “bottled beverages”. So I thought, water can be replaced by tap water (I do that personally because I don’t want carry crates that are unnecessary) but what about beer, for example? I could order kegs (no sarcasm, they start at 5 liters) but can hardly take them with me.
So, by “bottled beverages” you don’t count “returnable bottles”. Apart from that differentiation not being obvious, it didn’t occur to me because in my country almost all sold bottles are returnable, even single-use ones.
Hope that clarifies my question. Maybe next time don’t immediately jump to conclusions and make assumptions about other people’s lifestyle.
Getting everything you want at any time is part of the reason why the planet’s dying. Consumerism is not sustainable. Just one example: one wants a coffee and isn’t at home. Solution today: get a single-use plasticcy paper cup of coffee with an optional packaged portion of sweetener and / or cream, a plastic stirring thingy, and a plastic lid. All that goes to waste because people were led to believe that a “paper” cup is good for the environment. It isn’t.
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