Coca-Cola Begins Introduction of Attached Caps | Hacker News Reader

Coca-Cola Begins Introduction of Attached Caps

cocacolaep.com

25 pointsKaibeezy68 comments

Back in June they announced they would use 100% recycled plastic in UK bottles[0], and in October they announced a prototype plant-based plastic bottle[1]. If other companies copy this, we're fast reaching the limits of how sustainable packaging can be (short of reusing your own container, or consuming less).

[0] https://www.letsrecycle.com/news/coca-cola-to-use-100-recycl...

[1] https://www.coca-colacompany.com/press-releases/coca-cola-un...

And it'll still be worse than the classic, returnable and reused, glass bottles.

That's not that easy and depends on many factors. Glass bottles are heavy and have to be transported around. If they have to travel "long" distance, between filling, customer, cleaning and refilling it can be better, energy-wise, to use light plastic bottle which is "disposed" properly (maybe burning in power plant) For the local brewery reusable glass bottles usually win, though, on environmental perspective.

The ideal would seem to be to have local bottling plants for everything. It'd be more expensive, but much better for the environment.

Even better would be to just transport the syrup and the CO2, and combine them with local water at the point of consumption.

AKA soda fountains.

I remember when a simiar thing was done with aluminum soda cans. Old soda cans the top pulled all the way off and people frequently threw them on the ground. To this day I still see old can tops on the ground. This isn't nearly as big a change since bottle tops are resealable so don't get tossed on the ground nearly as much.

Some commenters are suggesting a better option is reusable glass bottles, which I wouldn't object to, but are there resealable glass bottles? (honest question, I haven't seen them. Most of my experience with glass bottles are beer bottles with pop off or twist off caps, but cant be resealed.)

There are – coke even sells them:

https://www.woolworths.com.au/shop/productdetails/822719/coc...

thanks. I hadn't seen these--probably not in the US. I do like the idea of reducing waste.

You can buy those glasbottles again here in germany, I think they reintroduced them two or three years ago, before that I had last seen them around 1995. I don't drink that much coke, but when then I always try to buy those glasbottles, it just tastes so much better.

I recall two-liter resealable glass bottles of Coca-Cola before everything switched to plastic. A quick search shows that these could be returned for a deposit.

Or you know glass bottles which can be returned and re-used. Like they used to do. This is just them again pretending to care about the environment

As can plastic bottles.

Sure many things can, allow me to ask what percentage of coca-cola bottles are actually using recycled plastic?

All of them in my country.

First off that will only happen in countries where the marketing negatives of not using recycled bottles impact sales (note that is not a lot of countries).

Second, recycled bottles are not made 100% from recycled plastic. You can tell that claim is misleading because if they were made 100% from recycled plastic they would be near opaque and dark grey rather than the pristine transparency that customers expect. Plastic recycling has a colour/type separation problem.

Third unlike glass or aluminium, plastic becomes brittle after a few recycling cycles, so even in a perfect circular economy you would still have to introduce 'new' plastic into these batches.

Yes Coca-Cola, Pepsico, Unilever, Nestle, etc. may claim to use recycled plastic but they are not using recycled plastic exclusively and they never will be able, plastic recycling is and always has been a marketing exercise to externalize the cost of plastic from Industry to consumers.

Birds don’t eat glass

Sure they do. https://www.popsci.com/seagull-garbage-eating-plastic-litter...

The market for post-consumer recycled plastic materials is arbitrarily close to zero. Plastic recyclables just go into a different landfill than regular waste.

The recyclable symbols on the things you buy are there to make you feel better about buying plastic products, not because there's an actual functioning recycle usage chain.

Edit added: According to the EPA data less than 9% of plastic put into recycling bins is actually re-used (and most of that re-use is of much cleaner and more uniform manufacturing waste, not actually post-consumer waste)[0]

[0]https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-...

This is because people don't want to make it work. It works in plenty of European countries.

The issue isn't whether people put plastic waste into recycling bins, it's about whether any of that plastic gets taken out of the bins and re-used in commercial processes. Today, across the entire world, that answer is essentially no. Yes, there are products made with recycled plastic (Coca Cola is the current poster child). They are rare because its considerably more expensive and more difficult to work with recycled plastic, and most are made primarily with waste from manufacturing processes not post-consumer waste (I suspect Coke's volume is high enough that they need to tap the post-consumer stream but I haven't found any data on that).

>The issue isn't whether people put plastic waste into recycling bins

Thats not what I'm saying. The bottle are being reused here. What makes it rare other places can and have been solved many other places. That your system is bad is not an argument against a working system.

The coca cola plan to make all their bottles from 100% recycled plastic was apparently delayed because they couldn't buy enough recycled plastic, which suggests there is a chicken and egg aspect to this.

There are tradeoffs, you need to think about the whole lifecycle.

Glass is heavier, which means more fuel burned to carry it.

You need to wash it too, more detergent in the ecosystem.

Glass bottles don't leach estrogen. Won't happen

They seem to be working on that too[0]. In the article they mention both glass and plastic bottles. As far as I understand, reusable plastic bottles are more environment friendly than glass ones, because they require less resources to make and transport.

Note that the article title claims Coca Cola to be 'industry leading', but I do not think reusing plastic bottles is new? I remember returning plastic bottles to the supermarket back when I was a kid ~20 years ago, and I believe the higher quality plastic bottles were collected to be re-used not re-cycled.

[0] https://www.coca-colacompany.com/news/coca-cola-announces-in...

According to an eco site this will have some impact, they call it "leash the lid":

> 6 Most Common Sources of Plastic Pollution

> 1 of 6: Food Wrappers & Containers (31.14% of pollution in environment, by unit count)

> 2 of 6: Bottle & Container Caps (15.5%)

> Nobody really thinks about caps. Most of the attention when tossing a plastic bottle is on the bottle itself. Caps are terrible for the environment because they float on the surface of water and look like a tasty morsel for birds: “For some species, such as the Pacific Albatross, plastic ingestion is a major factor in their decline and potential extinction.” 5 Gyres believes that policy-makers should implement “leash the lid” rules, requiring manufacturers to attach caps to bottles to prevent their escape and encourage tandem recycling.

https://www.treehugger.com/most-common-sources-plastic-pollu...

I wish we'd just try to avoid recycling plastic in the first place, and reduce its presence wherever possible.

Aluminium and glass are way less harmful to the environment and can be recycled almost infinitely.

I can count on one hand when I ever handed a plastic bottle without a cap back to recycling or to the store (we have deposits on everything and the cap is not included). I think the only people I remember tossing them were coworkers on a construction site. I will admit we sometimes took them off to repurpose them, e.g. for mixing colors for painting, but then they were tossed in the normal trash, so this wouldn't change anything.

So either this is highly dependent on where you take those numbers or I will call complete bullshit.

You are literally giving anecdotal evidence with N=1.

> But the Beach Environmental Awareness Campaign Hawaii (B.E.A.C.H.) found that “plastic bottle caps are one of the top 10 items found during marine debris beach clean-ups and are the second most littered item after cigarette butts.”

https://sustainability.weill.cornell.edu/recycling/bottle-ca...

> The 2017 International Coastal Cleanup, an annual beach cleanup event run by ocean advocacy group Ocean Conservancy, reported that plastic bottle caps were the third most collected item worldwide

https://resource.co/article/what-should-you-do-plastic-bottl...

No, not n=1. Every time I see cases of empty bottles (for example at the shop where I buy them, most of them on the spent cases are still on, if they sit in plain view), same with every person I know who I see drinking from a bottle.

Also I live 800km from the sea, so maybe central Europe is simply different?

This makes me wonder: where does most of the ocean plastic originate from, and what path does it take to get there?

A web search turned up this interesting analysis:

https://ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics

> Bottle caps are often discarded and littered.

So the problem is really people are pieces of shit; open the bottle, chuck the cap on the ground and walk on.

I guess now at least the cap and the bottle will be discarded together rather than seperately - halving the amount of littering.

Always blame the individual not the corporation...

For littering? Absolutely

Why not allocate blame & cheer to the individual & corporation as appropriate.

So in this case.. littering = bad individual, anti-littering product changes = good corporation.

The structural problems that I imagine are at play here:

- apparently people buy bottles without the intent of resealing them, maybe offering cups as an alternative would fit them better?

- maybe some people litter due to a lack of conveniently accessible bins

- maybe littering can be reduced by educational programs

- why are people buying cola at all? Drinking from the tap or a drinking fountain would be much more environmentally friendly and healthier.

-- Drinking fountains are rare in most countries

-- In some countries tap water isn't great for consumption

-- Coca Cola spends a lot of money convincing us to buy it

-- Sugary drinks have a certain appeal to our senses

I probably missed a couple. But while Coca-Cola is responsible for some of them, at least as many of them are about public infrastructure driving the choices of individuals.

This was likely introduced due to producer responsibilty laws which would make the corporation responsible for the cost of cleanup.

Its funny how corporations can come up with solutions when they are the ones that are paying to clean up the waste. Much cheaper to blame the individual but they can only get away with for so long.

This isn't the argument. People vote with their wallets. If the corp makes recyclable glass bottles, customers will buy a competitors plastic ones. It is still mostly down to the customer to either buy something more sustainable or to recycle it at least.

Always blame the corporation that sold the person a bottle of coke, and not the piece of shit sitting on a bench, next to a rubbish bin, who drinks it then throws the empty bottle in the river infront of them.

At least in Australia the lids are considered too small to recycle as they are too light and blow around so you’re supposed to put them in the rubbish. They had also traditionally been a different plastic which sometimes was an issue.

So it does truly potentially help in the recycling regard. Note however the professing facilities and requirements for this vary wildly from state to state and country to country and also they often ask for a lowest common denominator of all the recycling plants. So it’s not that some places potentially can’t but not all.

Leaving them on also causes issues because if the bottles are air right they don’t compress as well.

My understanding is that plastic is almost never recycled in America. Does Australia actually have a working plastic recycling system?

Far from perfect but apparently yes: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-04-06/plastic-recycling-ind...

> They had also traditionally been a different plastic which sometimes was an issue.

In Poland we set the caps aside then dump into dedicated containers, set up by charity organizations. This specific plastic is supposedly valuable enough to warrant separate recycling logistics.

Its all marketing, paid by EU Eco funds. Caps land in the landfill.

For dealing with the bottles Germany has a bottle deposit, (up to 0.25€ depending on bottle and kind of drink, for partially weird reasons)

Aside from many people returning bottles, that makes it "lucrative" for some people to collect thrown away bottles and returning them. (while I find it questionable to have a situation where people search through trash for that little money ...)

It's indeed socially unideal to have people rummage in trash, but it's because it's not "little money" to them. It's what they need to get by. Searching in other people's waste makes the difference of enough money to buy a fruit and a bread roll.

Yeah definitely not little money. Here people travel to the country and buy tickets to large music festivals with the only purpose being collecting bottles and cans. While a calculated hourly pay would be bad compared to most salaries here, it still end up being much more than it is possible to make many other places.

Yes, it's not little money for them. That's not what I wanted to imply. It is little money for most parts of society, but to them it is enough to warrant digging through dirt. Which, in my view, shows that there is something wrong as we like to praise our social system. (but then things are more complex ...)

Thanks for making the distinction clear!

> while I find it questionable to have a situation where people search through trash for that little money ...

Living in a post-soviet country... Yeah, I don't see that often today (but I do), but 10+ years ago I would constantly see (poor) people collecting glass bottles and depositing for up to 0.06€, to get another drink... Nowdays plastic bottles go for 0.1€.

And it is not littered where I live - but they would get out that stuff from bins too. Anyway, it still is a thing.

Are the caps made of the same exact plastic as the bottles? If not, then these become mixed-type-plastic and cannot be recycled by most [UK] authorities.

Water bottles in Germany also recently started having these attached caps. I think it is a great start yet still way more has to be done. Especially since most countries don't even recycle their bottles and plastic waste still. Doesnt matter if the cap is attached or not if the whole bottle isn't recycled.

I really like the wash/reuse glass bottle systems in Germany and other European countries. In addition to the environmental benefits, the bottles themselves are nicer in my opinion.

We used to have similar setups in the US since forever, but they were discontinued with the introduction of disposable plastic bottles.

They are also extremely heavy, so they cost more to produce, more to transport and they are nuisance to get home.

Many of my fiends in Germany get them delivered and they take the empty bottles back, others bring them home in crates and similarly just take the crates back to the store when they return. A lot of bottling is done locally (as it is in the US as well actually) so the bottles themselves aren't traveling that far.

My impression is that this system works quite well.

> Many of my fiends in Germany get them delivered and they take the empty bottles back

And I assume this is done by charity for free, right? It works well if you don't mind spending lot of extra money for fixing the inconvenience of heavy glass bottles, which is not really solving any problem considering recycling rate in developed (EU) countries especially on plastic bottles. The effect of those few plastic bottles which won't get properly recycled is next to zero compared to other issues (let's look for instance at hypochondriacs using tons of respirators, usually very same people complaining about other people polluting enviroment), I suggest anyone who think glass bottles or plastic bottles with deposit are good ideas in developed EU to visit South East Asia to see how meaningless are these efforts.

Has anyone seen stats on what fraction of their source material for the recycled plastic is post-consumer waste vs manufacturing waste?

I just recently learned that this attachment is intended. I always thought it was a production flaw.

Ring pull on cans used to detach too. Overall that's been a great improvement, though it had the extra elemt of danger from lacerations.

I knew plenty of kids who would still pull off the ones that are supposed to stay detached because of the "fuss" of having something near your mouth. I can see this happening with the new design, people won't want to drink with the cap next to their mouth.

It would probably cost more but the pull and click lids are better because you don't remove them, you just drink through them. Not sure if these work with soda though without killing all the gas.

Can someone please link a video how does it work with opening bottle? Can't find it on Youtube.

The ring rotates along with the bottle cap while you are opening or closing it.

>circular economy for PET bottles

except recycling plastic doesnt happen, its a huge scam

Unhealthy content wrapped in plastic. But now I can feel good again about consuming it, because “attached cap”.

That’s how marketing works.

> Unhealthy content

It's just flavoured caffeine water.... just like your user name?

It’s mostly sugar.

The coke in the photo is zero sugar, so no it isn't.

True, artificial sweetener is just as healthy as apples.

You'll probably see this on water bottles as well.

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