Recent searches
Search options
The recent European switch to attached bottle lids for recycling is very interesting to me, because as an American I've always been told that plastic bottle caps *cannot* be recycled, and should be thrown in the trash while only the bottle itself gets recycled.
Anybody know the origin for this? Was it just a desire to sell more single-use plastics? Are detached lids so small that the effort to extract them from the waste stream is too much to justify the amount of material you get? Something else?
@azonenberg it's attached so they don't end up in the water was my understanding, not to do with recycling per-se, just that you don't want them coming off and going into stormwater.
@dotstdy ah, interesting.
So there is still ~no recycling for bottle caps? Attaching them seemed weird to me because they're typically a different type of plastic than the bottle itself, so you'd need to separate them before you could recycle either.
@azonenberg not really sure, as far as i understand it plastic recycling in general is uh... not really recycling in general. so my expectation would be that it makes no real difference.
@dotstdy Yeah I know, that's why I was confused. Like, it seemed silly to go through all this engineering effort to hold onto a tiny bit of what's essentially garbage and isn't going to be usefully recycleable anyway.
@azonenberg @dotstdy Where they exist, the bottle collection schemes have taken them with the lids before as well. The entire thing gets shredded and afaik can be separated based on density well-enough afterwards.
@azonenberg @dotstdy the new rules mandate that the (attached) cap must be made of the same material as the bottle it is attached to, to make recycling easier
@freci @azonenberg @dotstdy
This is my understanding.
Around two decades before this change the bottle caps got redesigned and the gasket that used to be in them got replaced by a new design.
From what I recall the gasket material (the blue stuff usually) was not PET, so it would contaminate the shredded plastic.
But back then, at least in Finland the bottles were hard and not soft and got washed and reused, just like glass beer bottles.