Oh no!
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 5:19 PM on October 5 [4 favorites]

Fascinating enough, I ran into the same culture-shock-of-a-bottle-cap moving to India. Its also common at well trafficked hikes and parks to make you pay a deposit at the entry if you carry in a single-use plastic bottle that you get back on exit if you display the bottle. They also got the no plastic straws memo early as I haven't seen them anywhere. Overall, its incredible to see the necessity of innovation to reduce waste over a country of 1.4 billion+ people. (And yes, bum guns).
posted by rubatan at 5:22 PM on October 5 [9 favorites]

It's so very American to be enraged by having to hold a soda bottle slightly differently, even if it means more recycling and less waste. "This is better for the planet." "BUT MAH CONVENIENCE!!"
posted by DirtyOldTown at 5:23 PM on October 5 [32 favorites]

The shit that people will whine about is just astonishing to me. Such a culture of adult-sized children.
posted by Ickster at 5:25 PM on October 5 [26 favorites]

I predict a 2.1% increase in emergency room treatments for cuts and lacerations due to people trying to lop off the cap with a knife, pliers, blowtorch or tin snips.
posted by clavdivs at 5:29 PM on October 5 [6 favorites]

From the video, it seems as though people just aren’t bothering with the second step, which looks like it holds the cap securely.

I personally love this idea, because I hate dropping a cap, searching for it, and then putting it back on the bottle I’m going to drink from. More eco-friendly, and more sanitary.
posted by elphaba at 5:36 PM on October 5 [11 favorites]

Having just returned from Europe, I found many caps to be badly made and unable to flip fully open.

It’s maddening that so many European governments haven’t taken the obvious step of installing drinking fountains to reduce bottle use. In Spain, there are public water taps, but they all point down, so they’re good for washing your feet but useless for drinking.
posted by Just the one swan, actually at 5:42 PM on October 5 [1 favorite]

Couldn’t you use the downward facing taps to refill your reusable water bottle?
posted by awfurby at 5:50 PM on October 5 [28 favorites]

I always liked the Japanese ramune bottle design, but that doesn't translate to plastic so I suppose this is the next best thing. I actually want this for my distilled water bottles, whose caps I am constantly losing...
posted by brook horse at 6:00 PM on October 5 [4 favorites]

I predict a 1.3% increase in doctor visits concerning stomach problems that could be associated with placing one's finger or thumb upon the lid of a cap, rescrewing it and drinking from said bottle, again.

I predict a 3.1% increase in chipped teeth, a .3% increase in cheek and tongue lacerations.
posted by clavdivs at 6:06 PM on October 5 [4 favorites]

Visited Europe this summer. Not losing the cap is lovely! As handy as it is sanitary.
posted by billjings at 6:33 PM on October 5 [9 favorites]

Well, this explains the cap on the imported ice tea I've been buying at the italian deli! The first time, I thought it was a manufacturing error; the second time, I guessed it was an anti-littering thing. Go me!
posted by moonmilk at 6:35 PM on October 5 [1 favorite]

“I open a water bottle,” the 22-year-old New Yorker said, “and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, why is this touching my face?’”

The idea that Americans are stupid is not exactly a new idea, but I don't see why the Wall Street Journal has to lean into it so hard. But also, flip top sport caps are already a thing in the US, and while it is possible to screw them off completely, the more typical use has them sort of hanging there, tickling beards and scratching people's sensitive face skin with their jagged plastic edges. I mean, that's what I assume happens to the people interviewed in this article, I've never noticed it when I used them.

Luckily, real Americans don't have to worry about those European bottles, because they can just shoot the caps off with their pistols as God and George Washington intended.
posted by surlyben at 6:36 PM on October 5 [21 favorites]

Naah, don't waste ammo. Just whack it off with the Bowie Knife carried on your other hip.
posted by aleph at 6:54 PM on October 5 [3 favorites]

You're supposed to sip from a bottle, not clamp your lips around it and go DOOK DOOK DOOK
posted by scruss at 7:14 PM on October 5 [18 favorites]

Next the workers will be controlling the means of production!!
posted by senor biggles at 7:15 PM on October 5 [5 favorites]

The idea that Americans are stupid is not exactly a new idea, but I don't see why the Wall Street Journal has to lean into it so hard.

People enjoy going off on the topic. Most assuredly there were also many Americans who experienced these bottles and had nothing to say because they drank out of the bottle without issue or much thought at all because that's not even a new thing to an American anyway.

It is the nature of modern journalism to need some nucleus of emotion or reaction to base articles around. They as an organization have ruled out simple fact reporting like "new EU rules have disposable drinks with a different cap design now," they find an angle and it worked. Here we are, commenting on quoted individuals and imagined folks alike.
posted by GoblinHoney at 7:19 PM on October 5 [10 favorites]

Real Americans do not put their lips to the flip top sport caps, we simply squirt it into their mouth sometimes up to an exceeding 1 m.

we must remember that the shorelines and lakes and Parks of America were at one time littered with pull tabs, remember, Aunt Grace warned not put that pull tab back in the can.
I mean, ever get a pull tab between your toes walking on the sand, you got to hold your foot up hop around like a bunny or fall on your butt to retrieve it.
posted by clavdivs at 7:25 PM on October 5 [11 favorites]

The corollary to this is the UK which got the tethered caps against their will, because even though they’re not an EU country they’re not big enough to get their own run on untethered caps.
posted by jmauro at 7:35 PM on October 5 [14 favorites]

this is what I'm talking about.

american, cuz we bought some of the parts from other countries and there are ours
solid, durable, accessible. optional pistol grip handle, Kevlar coating hand grip, functional night time strobe lights. The add on lower section can be used as a deflatable raft and store your dab kit.
posted by clavdivs at 7:36 PM on October 5 [1 favorite]

I loved the porcelain capped bottles of beer, with a wire contraption connecting it to the glass bottle, that I encountered when I was a soldier in Germany 1966-7 .
posted by Czjewel at 7:46 PM on October 5 [5 favorites]

If you mean swing top bottles, those are still available, but I think you mostly see them in home brew. I think Grolsch still uses them? They look fancy enough that guests are less likely to throw the bottles away, and the gasket between cap and bottle might fail before the bottle, in case the home brewer failed to stop the ferment before bottling. You can buy new empties, of course.
posted by surlyben at 8:03 PM on October 5 [5 favorites]

We encountered these in Italy last year, and we thought they were great! I only wish we had them here.
posted by briank at 8:04 PM on October 5 [1 favorite]

It’s maddening that so many European governments haven’t taken the obvious step of installing drinking fountains to reduce bottle use. In Spain, there are public water taps, but they all point down, so they’re good for washing your feet but useless for drinking.
posted by Just the one swan, actually

In many European countries the public water taps are designed to fill your reusable water bottle, not to drink straight from the tap.
posted by charles kaapjes at 8:23 PM on October 5 [12 favorites]

Will this keep youtubers who have a drink nearby as they're pontificating from undoing the cap, taking a drink, and then putting the fucking cap back on again even though in six minutes they're going to do it all again and nothing is going to happen in the meantime to endanger the bottle or its contents?

Sorry, had a moment there.
posted by maxwelton at 8:39 PM on October 5 [3 favorites]

I didn't realize this was a Europe thing; it's been on a couple of bottles I've had over the last couple months. Two things: One, you're an adult, don't drink pop like a toothless hobo. Second, it took me two seconds to figure out how to hold the cap out with my fingers by choking up a bit. If you are so stupid that you are defeated by a plastic bottle cap, you should be too ashamed to ever mention that to a reporter. This never would have happened in the days when we put people's home addresses in newspaper articles.
posted by klangklangston at 8:57 PM on October 5 [10 favorites]

The corollary to this is the UK which got the tethered caps against their will

I allowed myself a hollow cackle of remainer satisfaction at this when I visited this July.
After about 10 seconds at most of confusion they’re easy to drink from, and you don’t have to find anywhere to keep the cap, thus potentially losing it and being forced to drink the whole thing rapidly.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 10:20 PM on October 5 [3 favorites]

I'm Australian and I truly hate tethered caps because

a) recycling in my area only accepts bottles, strictly no caps or lids, so I would have to cut the lids off before they could go in the recycling bin

b) I'm clumsy and have poor proprioception, so the odds of a tethered cap getting in my eye are too high.

Having said that, I try to go with glass bottles for fruit juice, iced tea, iced coffee wherever possible because glass doesn't leach plastic compounds into my drink; and also glass is better for the environment than plastic.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 10:42 PM on October 5 [2 favorites]

I just encountered these for the first time last week as a tourist in France and Italy. About 30 seconds of annoyance, then acceptance, then accomodation. It genuinely is not a challenge to figure out how to use them.

The weirder thing is getting a disposable plastic water bottle in Europe at all. Water comes in fancy glass bottles, at a table with a glass like a civilized person.
posted by Nelson at 11:27 PM on October 5 [1 favorite]

Well, it would be nice if there was a standard way to attach the caps so you don't have to design a new way to defeat the cap every time, but thanks for the enrichment. There was more spillage from containers that looked closed but weren't until I adjusted my distrust levels.

But I'm pretty sure this is less fun with certain disabilities, or for the painful clumsy hands of old age. Or for the people who clean up the drinking accidents of young kids.
posted by Ashenmote at 11:28 PM on October 5 [1 favorite]

As an American currently visiting Europe who figured out how this works in zero minutes, I'm calling bullshit on the article.

Also, considering the Murdoch-owned source, this story should blow up on one of the fox outlets any minute now.
posted by SteveInMaine at 11:30 PM on October 5 [5 favorites]

As someone who lives in the EU, I got used to this in about a week. The one annoying thing that’s happened sometimes is that some cap designs have too much tension in them, so can flip back while you’re pouring, splashing liquid around. But that seems like a teething problem that will probably be worked out. On the plus side, besides the whole benefit to the environment thing, is that caps no longer go missing, which was a regular enough occurrence in a four person household of two children and two poets.
posted by Kattullus at 11:32 PM on October 5 [3 favorites]

Similar thing happened when soda can tabs became non-pull-off.

OK, similar thing minus the social media hype,
posted by wrm at 11:37 PM on October 5 [4 favorites]

My favorite part of the article was when they asked Coca Cola whether Americans will be getting these fancy water bottle caps anytime soon and the poor comms intern had to come up with a diplomatic way to say "Americans would make this into a 'culture war' thing in about five seconds flat and it's literally the last thing we want to deal with, so no" without saying any of that
posted by potrzebie at 12:15 AM on October 6 [12 favorites]

I use an old plastic mouthwash bottle as my carry-round. The beauty of it is its flat shape, which slips far more comfortably into a jacket pocket. Why don't people make reusable water bottles that shape too?

Returning to the attached cap "issue", I wonder how long it will be till Donald Trump starts fulminating about this at his rallies? It'd make a change from ranting about low-flush toilets at least.
posted by Paul Slade at 12:33 AM on October 6 [1 favorite]

These bottle tops appeared on our apple juice bottles first, and it wasn’t a problem. Sure, they weren’t well done, you had to hold them sometimes to stop them from going into the steam of the pour, but it seemed like a good idea. Then I noticed them on all bottles during a trip to the neighbouring country, when I didn’t have my regular water bottle with me, and it was fine.

I’ve always found drinking from a can weird. You squish your face up to the little hole? Sometimes your nose touches the ring pull? I don’t see people complaining about that, although it seems like the same set of triggers.
posted by The River Ivel at 1:23 AM on October 6 [3 favorites]

Now we could also mention that we don't really recycle most of the stuff, but I don't mind the new caps. They are bad only on yogurt bottles because the cap fills when you shake it, it drips if you don't think about the orientation. Maybe going back to more glass would be better for recycling too?
posted by mayoarchitect at 1:24 AM on October 6 [1 favorite]

Where are those long-termism folks when we’re talking about using glass bottles vs plastic ones?
posted by skyscraper at 1:30 AM on October 6 [2 favorites]

Hmmm that was opaque. Hint: externalities.
posted by skyscraper at 1:32 AM on October 6 [1 favorite]

I don't live in Europe, but was vaguely aware of this through internet memes because right-wingers in Europe tried really hard to make it into a culture war a few months ago. Lots of outraged TikToks with infomercial-grade acting and water spilled everywhere. This looks like an extension of the same phenomenon.
posted by confluency at 2:27 AM on October 6 [1 favorite]

Culture shcok? CULTURE SHOCK?!

My, we Americans are a sorry spoiled bunch. And what a clickbait article...

I first noticed the tethered tops on the washing-up liquid here in France, about a year ago. Didn't think all that much about at the time. Then, this summer, they started to appear on the apple juice and the store-bought gazpacho.

That's when I noticed them and in about 45 seconds, figured out how to work with them. I avoid bottled water (perfectly nice metal water bottle, or re0useable glass bottles with the Grolsch-type tops).

Much ado about nothing....
posted by aldus_manutius at 3:07 AM on October 6 [1 favorite]

As well as thethered bottle caps, a beverage deposit return scheme was launched in Ireland on 1st Feb 2024 covering PET plastic bottles and aluminium cans with a capacity between 150ml and 3 litres. We pay upfront 15c or 25c extra and the return of clean uncrushed containers is by barcode-reading RVM [reverse-vending] machines costing ~€12K. My first time, I naively tried it without my glasses [how hard could it be??] and couldn't read any of the messages (press for receipt, for e.g.); a more experienced ould geezer at the next machine kindly helped me out.
The plastic bag levy was introduced here on 4th March 2002 at the rate of 15 cent per ~2c grocery bag and instantly cleared up the streetscape.
posted by BobTheScientist at 4:40 AM on October 6 [4 favorites]

The shit that people will whine about is just astonishing to me. Such a culture of adult-sized children.

Based on how effortlessly my 6yo son and his cousins adapted to this over the summer, I read that as monstrously unfair to children. It takes years of being coddled by the right-wing media to develop a sense of entitlement like that.
posted by adamsc at 4:48 AM on October 6 [4 favorites]

This strikes me as yet another distraction that plastics recycling is a fraud in the first place.
posted by TedW at 4:55 AM on October 6 [11 favorites]

I was in Italy a few weeks ago and these were completely fine? An improvement, even.
posted by advil at 4:58 AM on October 6 [2 favorites]

metafilter: clamp your lips around it and go DOOK DOOK DOOK
posted by lalochezia at 5:07 AM on October 6 [11 favorites]

I'm not even going to RTFA, because we in the UK lived through this bullshit moment of non-event complaining a few months ago. The bottle caps work fine. They take about the same amount of adaptation as adapting to non-ring-pull cans did years ago. Whatever the recycling potential, it reduces litter and helps reduce the number of separate pieces of plastic in waterways, which is all good.

If you mean swing top bottles, those are still available, but I think you mostly see them in home brew. I think Grolsch still uses them? They look fancy enough that guests are less likely to throw the bottles away, and the gasket between cap and bottle might fail before the bottle, in case the home brewer failed to stop the ferment before bottling. You can buy new empties, of course.

The Grolsch ones are hard to find now in UK supermarkets, unfortunately. I had to hunt around for some when my bass-guitarist son learned from his teacher a few years ago that the red rubber gaskets are perfect for holding guitar straps in place on the metals pegs on your guitar. It's true, they're exactly the right size. I did find some bottles eventually, and dutifully drank half a dozen (what a hardship) so I could give him four red rubber rings for his two guitars along with a couple of spares. If you do see any and you have guitarists in your life, you know what to do.
posted by rory at 5:22 AM on October 6 [3 favorites]

If it keeps some fragile USians from moving to Europe, I'm all for it. I'm not especially fond of the danglers, but I don't much bat an eye at them anymore.
posted by rabia.elizabeth at 5:39 AM on October 6 [1 favorite]

I didn't have to relearn how to drink from bottles with these caps when they came to the UK, but I did have to relearn how to screw them on securely after dumping 300+ml of unfinished beverage into my bag a few times by accident. They leak a lot more easily unless you get an absolutely perfect seal; it took me a while to realise that the cap needs to be set totally straight on and snap in place before being screwed tight. The older style caps had a greater tolerance for being screwed on slightly askew without leaking.
posted by terretu at 5:49 AM on October 6 [4 favorites]

The first one of these I encountered (on an unnecessarily hot day's train trip) was completely impossible to open by hand. I spent about an hour or so attempting to cut it loose with my house keys (which just mangled it) while frantically googling how they're supposed to be opened (which yielded nothing but press releases, cobbled-together local newspaper articles, and complaints about less fundamental problems with them). Eventually we got off to transfer, parched, and queued up at the shop on the platform (same chain as the one we bought it from). The staff there had no more luck than we did by hand, until one of them fetched a damp cloth to work with. We were profusely thankful and bought a pair of ice creams.

Since then all the tethered bottle caps I've encountered have worked just fine! Feeling the rough edge of the lid scrape across one's face or fingers while drinking or pouring is very unpleasant but mostly tolerable. I feel like a very loud ad campaign saying "GOOD NEWS, RECYCLING PLASTIC BOTTLES IS SIMPLER NOW, YOU CAN LEAVE THE CAPS ON" would have been easier all around, at least in places where that's the case. Or not making unrecyclable lids to begin with?
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 6:48 AM on October 6 [1 favorite]

If it keeps some fragile USians from moving to Europe, I'm all for it. I'm not especially fond of the danglers, but I don't much bat an eye at them anymore.

danglers is a pretty fun name for fragile American men!
posted by srboisvert at 6:49 AM on October 6 [2 favorites]

The gymnastics people create around bottled water exhaust me. And now all I can think about is the microplastics killing us all anyway, while people whine about stopping a teensy amount of garbage floating in the ocean. Sigh.
posted by tiny frying pan at 7:02 AM on October 6 [2 favorites]

I went to France in May and encountered these for the first time. Oblivious, fidgety me ripped the first one off immediately (but recycled it along with the bottle), not realizing the point - which reveals the fragility of the right-wing complaints. After that I stopped noticing or caring. On the list of annoyances this is somewhere below "rough spot on fingernail".
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 7:03 AM on October 6 [2 favorites]

Surely a lot of the time we can pour our beverages into a glass? It's true that sometimes you have to buy a bottle to drink right then and there, and sometimes, as at concerts, security needs and grift combine and only bottled water is allowed, but most of us most of the time are either drinking things in a place where we can pour into a glass (maybe from a larger, cost-saving bottle, even?) or able to pre-plan by bringing a water bottle? Even I, a vulgar American from a culture which thinks nothing of eating sandwiches while walking down the street, am able to manage my hydration without buying bottled drinks very often. Like, in my lifetime we've developed this lifeway where we are all always "hydrating" and are no longer comfortable thinking "I'm thirsty, when I get home in thirty minutes I'm really looking forward to a big drink of water" - I think most of us unconsciously assume that it is dangerous to be thirsty for more than a moment.
posted by Frowner at 7:06 AM on October 6 [3 favorites]

I’ve always found drinking from a can weird. You squish your face up to the little hole? Sometimes your nose touches the ring pull?

My nose fits perfectly onto the ring pull while drinking from a seltzer can and I kind of love it.
posted by tiny frying pan at 7:07 AM on October 6 [6 favorites]

Just got a notice from our county waste department that we’re not allowed to put anything in the bin “smaller than a fist,” which they specified means “take off bottle caps and discard them separately.”

Sorry, nah. Plastics recycling isn’t even real in the first place. Either take all the plastics that are allegedly the right type or gtfo
posted by toodleydoodley at 7:12 AM on October 6 [3 favorites]

recycling in my area only accepts bottles, strictly no caps or lids, so I would have to cut the lids off before they could go in the recycling bin
-
Just got a notice from our county waste department that we’re not allowed to put anything in the bin “smaller than a fist,” which they specified means “take off bottle caps and discard them separately.”

Yeah, if this reduces plastic in the ocean, great! But I'm skeptical a different designed plastic water bottle is the answer to too much plastic in the ocean.
posted by coffeecat at 8:00 AM on October 6 [2 favorites]

Europe made an eco-friendly change to plastic bottles. It is driving tourists crazy.

In my professional opinion, I'm beginning to think the Wall Street Journal is a stupid fucking newspaper that reports on dumb bullshit.

In my professional opinion.
posted by AlSweigart at 8:06 AM on October 6 [8 favorites]

Ohh, this makes the Greek sodas I get make sense. I like the caps so I'd been taking them off to save, which is harder now with the tethers. But yeah, no big deal really.
posted by limeonaire at 8:21 AM on October 6 [1 favorite]

(Yes, I'm aware that the WSJ is a conservative paper and this is just another culture war propaganda piece to make any environmental policy, no matter how small, be cast as ridiculous, inconvenient, and untenable for implementation in America while having a token supporting quote at the very end to dodge accusations of bias. Doesn't change my point about the WSJ though )
posted by AlSweigart at 8:31 AM on October 6 [2 favorites]

While we were in Europe this summer, my kid kept showing me TikToks of like people tearing the cap off while "God Bless the USA" played.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:06 AM on October 6 [2 favorites]

Plastic recycling is a bit less of a mirage in the EU thanks to stricter regulations. In Poland in particular, you can put just about any plastic food packaging in the recycling, doesn't even have to be clean. (Paper does have to be clean.) There are very strict country level targets about garbage collection and recycling, which forces research and construction of appropriate and expensive facilities. An industry rife with abuse, yes, but the tech is there.

And all the people above who think it's only about water - nope. If it comes with a screw on cap, it's affected. Milk (which is a bother because those caps are sturdy and flat and hard to screw back on). Juice in big bottles. Boxed wine in natch, recyclable-in-Europe tetra pack boxes.
posted by I claim sanctuary at 9:08 AM on October 6 [3 favorites]

Plastic recycling is still a mirage as far as effectiveness, no? The links I can find say only about 30% of plastic in the EU is actually recycled.
posted by tiny frying pan at 9:15 AM on October 6 [1 favorite]

Rip it off then. It's not hard.
A person got paid to write this article?
posted by haapsane at 9:27 AM on October 6 [1 favorite]

I did find some bottles eventually, and dutifully drank half a dozen (what a hardship) so I could give him four red rubber rings for his two guitars along with a couple of spares.

You can buy the rubber rings separately (homebrewers will replace them as they eventually get old and brittle so the bottles can be used over and over).
posted by ssg at 9:58 AM on October 6

I like this. I just came back from a visit with a friend in L.A. who showed me this very thing. I'm happily surprised because I would put the lids back on bottles when I was done and people would stop me because "THE LIDS ARE NOT RECYCLABLE YOU MONSTER!"
posted by evilDoug at 10:39 AM on October 6

But I'm pretty sure this is less fun with certain disabilities, or for the painful clumsy hands of old age.

I've found that the new caps don't need to be twisted as far as the old ones, so I actually expect them to work out better. Also, no risk of dropping the cap.

For getting the cap to twist back on properly, I often use the trick of turning it in the opposite direction slightly, first. This tends to align things properly.
posted by demi-octopus at 10:47 AM on October 6

The beauty of it is its flat shape, which slips far more comfortably into a jacket pocket. Why don't people make reusable water bottles that shape too?

Memobottle.
posted by box at 12:23 PM on October 6

In the EU, once plastics are actually in the recycling stream, they get recycled. The trouble is with sorting them there, even though providing the separate collection of plastics is obligatory for all local governments, as are contracts with certified recycling facilities. They do still get burned far too much (mostly from mixed trash too expensive to sort properly) but as of 2022 we're finally properly recycling more than gets landfilled, and it's mostly illegal to export plastic trash to other countries the way the US does it. This is part of the reasoning for the bottle caps - they're the best part of the bottle, dense and easily processed, prized by recycling facilities. The overall EU target is for each new bottle to be made of 25% of recycled plastic on average by 2030, and we're at 13.5% now.

I suspect we pay a lot more for garbage collection than the US average though. A quick search shows me that random upstate NY towns charge about $90 per year per residence - in Warsaw that's about $385 per apartment per year adjusting for purchase power parity, $580 annually for a single family home.

(And at least in Poland the new caps are solidly attached. Like a good minute of twisting and effort to pull them off, and you're doing it with an open container of liquid.)
posted by I claim sanctuary at 12:32 PM on October 6 [1 favorite]

If you mean swing top bottles, those are still available, but I think you mostly see them in home brew. I think Grolsch still uses them?

At least here in the US, the Grolsch tops are now plastic. Which makes them useless as toke stones. And if you don’t know what a toke stone is you are too young to be reading this comment and need to get off my lawn.
posted by TedW at 12:38 PM on October 6

Is this beneficial for the environment? I don't really see a disproportionate amount of bottle caps in the litter around my city. I find chip bags and cigarette butts are much more common. The effect is likely swamped by Germany shutting off its nuclear plants.
posted by hermanubis at 1:05 PM on October 6 [1 favorite]

At least here in the US, the Grolsch tops are now plastic. Which makes them useless as toke stones

I didn't know that. You can, of course, buy just the ceramic swing top caps from home brew suppliers, but at that point, you are probably better off just buying a purpose-built toke stone. That lacks the plausible deniability and DIY magic of using a beer bottle cap, I suppose.
posted by surlyben at 1:17 PM on October 6

a beverage deposit return scheme was launched in Ireland on 1st Feb 2024

This was due to happen in Scotland too not so long ago. All the supermarkets suddenly built fancy shelters in their car parks full of machines to process the bottle returns they anticipated. But then the UK Government stuck its oar in on some technicality that means it'll now take another year before it comes in, if at all.

In short: All the supermarkets in Scotland now have nice little outbuildings in the car park which they're using to sell their plants and garden goods.
posted by penguin pie at 1:25 PM on October 6

I don't really see a disproportionate amount of bottle caps in the litter around my city.

You’re probably not seeing them because they’ve already been washed down the storm drain. The single-use plastic directive isn’t aimed at cleaning up your city, unless you live in the ocean.

The 10 most commonly found single-use plastic items on European beaches, alongside fishing gear, represent 70% of all marine litter in the EU.

The effect is likely swamped by Germany shutting off its nuclear plants.

This isn’t Sim City - there’s no idealized Environment Rating where shutting down nuclear plants gives you -200 and researching bottle cap technology gives you -5. Germany changing their power sources will have minimal impact on ocean plastics pollution. You can argue over their relative impacts, but they target very different things, and bringing it up is basically a non sequitur.
posted by zamboni at 3:48 PM on October 6 [2 favorites]

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