Andrew Zonenberg2d ago

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?

Show threadJosh Simmons2d 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.
Show threadAndrew Zonenberg2d 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.

Show threadJosh Simmons2d 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.
Show threadAndrew Zonenberg
@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.
Jun 22 at 10:02pmWeb