Mastodawn

Andrew Zonenberg

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?

penguin42 20h ago

@azonenberg That used to be the case in the UK as well, I'm not sure how it changed.

Markus Lindenberg 20h ago

@azonenberg EU doesn’t want the lid to be a separate piece of plastic trash littering the environment.

Josh Simmons 20h ago

@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.

Andrew Zonenberg 20h ago

@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.

Josh Simmons 20h ago

@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.

Andrew Zonenberg 20h ago

@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.

Steve F.19h ago

@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.

whoami - ☎️ 9467 20h ago

@azonenberg If I understand correctly, it's much more important to prevent people throwing the lids into the environment, either accidentally or on purpose. The ecological impact of recycling or not recycling the lids should be very minor in comparison as plastics recycling is a frustrating story on its own (doesn't really make economical sense atm and it's an engineering headache as recycled thermoplastics have worse mechanical properties).
I'm not sure about the process of separating the lid.

Andrew Zonenberg 20h ago

@whoami Ah I wasn't considering the litter side of things, I was assuming the potential outcomes were either recycle bottle + cap, trash bottle + cap, or recycle bottle and trash cap.

Fritz Adalis 20h ago

@azonenberg @whoami
I guess it's the bottle equivalent of pull tab vs. stay-on tabs on cans.

Axel Hartmann 19h ago

@azonenberg @whoami - first thing that happens is shredding everything. Next is hot water bath. Labels detach, paper plus adhesive gets filtered out, ideally while paper is still small bits and not yet dissolved to fibers. PET bottle material is just a tad heavier than water and sinks to be collected from the bottom. Plastic labels and bottle caps are slightly lighter than water and float to the top. And yes, they are all sought-after, high grade recycling material streams that do get used again. Much less contamination than general plastic waste streams.
Just like the stapler needles and paper clips in paper recycling: seems insignificant, but that's a ton of valuable metal that accumulates every couple of days...

Andrew Zonenberg 19h ago

@axel_hartmann @whoami Huh, I was under the impression that containers were normally sorted by type as solids and only *then* separated and shredded as relatively homogeneous materials.

Back when I was a kid we had separate recycling cans for HDPE/LDPE, metal, clear glass, green glass, and brown glass.

Axel Hartmann 19h ago

@azonenberg @whoami - I was referring to beverage bottle recycling, as they are typically separate from other recycling waste streams thanks to bottle deposit systems.

mkissin 20h ago

@azonenberg not sure if it’s the same but here in NZ, lots of stuff is theoretically recyclable but is small/light enough that it gives the machinery trouble so they ask you not to put it in the recycling bin. Lids and soft plastics are like this.
Having said that, most of our recycling gets stockpiled or goes to landfill anyway so, yeah.

buherator 20h ago

@azonenberg Afaik bottle caps are more valuable than the bottles, there are even dedicated collection campaigns for them around here

Alexander Bochmann 19h ago

@azonenberg I have not followed the full story either, but the source of this change seems to be Directive 2019/904, http://data.europa.eu/eli/dir/2019/904, which has this quote in paragraph 17: "Caps and lids made of plastic which are used for beverage containers are among the single-use plastic items that are found the most on beaches in the Union. Therefore, beverage containers that are single-use plastic products should only be allowed to be placed on the market if they fulfil specific product design requirements that significantly reduce the dispersal into the environment of beverage container caps and lids made of plastic."

Seems it took some time to get that implemented, and now we ended up with a "harmonised standard EN 17665:2022+A1:2023, Packaging – Test methods and requirements to demonstrate that plastic caps and lids remain attached to beverage containers"...

Search results - EUR-Lex

Oliver Seiler 11h ago

@azonenberg here in NZ they've started collecting lids for recycling too. I assume that they can be recycled and Europe is just a bit further ahead in managing the separation and recycling as part of the process.