PET bottle recycling is the only part of plastics recycling that actually works. Making sure the bottle caps are also correctly returned to recycling plants is a good goal. Also it makes picking up litter a little easier, because now you only need to pick up one thing instead of two.

Btw, this is why clothing/bags/... made out of recycled plastic bottles is actually a terrible idea, because once the PET is out of the bottle recycling stream it is permanently removed from this recycling loop and new PET needs to be produced to compensate.

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

Real ones get their micro plastics by chewing on used car tires.

I think the cap thing is more about littering because in those countries people litter only the cap for some reason?

I was handed a water bottle the.other day at a volunteer event and was lamenting the fact that in the US, we don't have attached caps. I almost immediately lost mine. It's possible to make them attached, AND not suck.

I end up dribbling because the lid gets in my way, but it's fine because I'm helping to offset the pollution caused by a billionaire's private jet.

I like the convenience of not losing the cap

I don't know what % of plastic the cap comprises in a plastic bottle but I bet its double digits. So annoying as it is to use, attaching the cap to the bottle does make sense for recycling. It also lessens litter.

But it needs to be paired up with a deposit refund scheme. Lots of countries do this already and encourages circular economies - the soft drinks companies purchasing recycle material to reuse. I bet those schemes measured a significant jump in recovered plastic when virtually all the caps come back with the bottles.

Attached cap prevents it from becoming a macroplastic

Thanks for explaining, I was worried this was a band aid mesure which didn't solve to root cause. /s

Simon Clark had a pretty good nuanced video on recycling and goes over plastics recycling in the latter parts of the video https://youtu.be/iOtrvBdRx8I

TL;DW Consider the environmental impact of systems over materials, most plastic doesn’t get recycled but some types of plastic are highly recyclable, existing plastic is undervalued, reduce > reuse > recycle.

Hahehahahehhahahahahhrha I don’t know what a thing is for

Conspiracy theory of mine - I’m European, so not sure if valid for the other side of the pond, but there was a massive campaign here to recycle the bottle caps by donating them for the creation of incubators for premature births. The local authorities placed massive donation boxes shaped like a heart and they were getting filled constantly.

Here’s the theory: When the campaign started getting up to speed, they started attaching the bottle caps to the bottle, because, I strongly believe, that out there, there is an absolute evil cunt who only feels something when a baby dies, so he wants fewer donated caps, because deep inside he knows people don’t care enough to snap the cap off.