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Bwho knew that opening a plastic bottle could ruin your week? This once simple act now comes with a dramatic side dish. When you try to sip from your bottle, you’ll find yourself making unhappy facial contortions as it pokes your nose or touches your chin. If you’re really unlucky, you’ll catch some liquid in the lid, which will then inevitably be catapulted up your top, leaving you looking a bit like a sad, soaked toddler still honing their motor skills. Try to break the thin connection between the lid and the rim of the bottle to avoid this mess, and you risk wetting yourself again.
The culprit, of course, is the small piece of plastic that attaches the lids to the bottles. The new design has been creeping quietly into the soft drink aisle over the past few years. If its critics are to be believed, this tiny but unwelcome addition to the packaging has turned a relatively simple process – grab the bottle, remove the lid, sip and enjoy – into a high-risk activity. One social media user described this development as “the worst thing to happen to humanity since the removal of the headphone jack (on smartphones)” – an exaggeration that, however, perhaps sums up the enormous dismay with which this change has been received in some quarters. Will you get soaked in front of your colleagues if you dare to take a sip of water during an important meeting? Or will you simply spill liquid on your laptop? The possibilities are endless.
The correct term for such a lid is “tethered”. The design goes back to a European Union directive that was proposed in 2018 and officially adopted the following year. A deadline was set: From July 3, 2024, according to the EU, the caps of all single-use plastic drinks bottles with a capacity of three liters or less must remain attached after opening.
The aim was not to collectively anger thirsty Europeans, but to tackle a serious problem: plastic waste. It is estimated that we produce around 400 million tonnes of it worldwide every year. Plastic breaks down into small particles but never disappears completely. These microplastics can harm the environment, pollute seas and soil, and enter the human body (it is linked to health problems such as hormonal imbalance and even cancer, and has also been found in the placenta).
What may seem like an annoying change seems much more sensible when you look at the impact of our soft drink habit. When the caps come off bottles, they often fall off or get lost, potentially blown away by the wind or carried by rain into drains or rivers that flow into the sea; bottle caps are one of the most common forms of plastic waste found on Europe’s beaches. And even if they do make it into a recycling bin and then to a processing plant, their small size is a problem. “Caps are filtered out by tumbler screens because they are too small,” explains Ross Lakhdari, circular economy expert at PA Consulting. “Basically, in this screening process, any item smaller than two inches is at risk of being lost.”
When these lids remain attached to something larger, they are less likely to be lost as litter or end up in the ocean, where they can be dangerous to wildlife like turtles and birds. Unfortunately, animals often mistake them for food – no wonder plastic lids are ranked among the five most harmful types of marine litter by the non-governmental organization Seas at Risk.
Although the plan seemed like a no-brainer, the EU directive initially faced resistance from major soft drink makers. Various multinationals claimed it would be too difficult and expensive to produce new, compliant caps and that they would be better off focusing on improving recycling processes instead. But since the directive was introduced, drinks makers have slowly rolled out the change to meet the 2024 deadline. So these tethered bottles haven’t appeared on our shelves overnight—Coca-Cola started selling them in Europe in 2022—they’ve just gradually become more widespread. Countries can decide on their own “effective, proportionate and dissuasive” penalties for those who break the rules.
But wait a minute, I hear you ask. The UK is no longer part of the European Union (Brexit means Brexit, blah, blah, blah). So why are these strapped bottles showing up here? Didn’t the “take back control” principle apply to our drinks too? Removable caps are actually perfectly legal in the UK (which is why you might still find the odd bottle with an old-fashioned cap). It simply makes little to no financial sense for major drinks companies to produce special strapless bottles (something like the soft drink equivalent of a post-Brexit blue passport) specifically for the relatively small UK market. They would effectively have to run two production lines at once, which would be far more costly. And so they are already covered should the UK ever introduce a similar rule of its own.
Caps are filtered out through sieve drums because they are too small
Ross Lakhdari, circular economy expert
Like anything that carries even the whiff of EU regulation, these slightly irritating lids have become a kind of lightning rod: a punching bag for those who, rather than getting upset about accidentally soaking their T-shirt in Fanta, would rather complain about overbearing bureaucracy and the nanny state.
You can find references to “woke bottle caps” on social media (sometimes ironic, sometimes not at all). Earlier this year The viewer published an article with the bold claim that “the EU has ruined plastic water bottles”.
This bottle-related EU smear is just as fierce within the EU. In the run-up to Italy’s recent European Parliament elections, bottle caps were even mentioned, with Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini citing the caps as evidence that his country needs “less Europe”. Yes, getting your face sprayed with Sprite is pretty annoying, but that’s hardly the stuff of an exciting election campaign, is it?
Maybe the problem isn’t the new lids, but our own ineptitude—maybe we could just learn to use them better? A viral TikTok video recently seemed to crack the code, showing us that we were actually opening bottles all wrong: All we needed to do was pull the lid over the top so it lay neatly to the side and wouldn’t get in trouble. And if you can’t manage that? May I suggest sipping carefully and trying to think of happy sea creatures instead of your squashed nose?
