The EU has ruined plastic water bottles

> What the EU – and everyone else – needs to be doing is to develop, or encourage the development of, plastics which can do the job of existing materials but which will break down in the environment in a matter of weeks or months, like paper and cardboard.

This would be amazing but there is a possibility that it's actually impossible. There is nothing magical about the environment. Paper and cardboard are physically degraded by moisture and chemically by fungus. The reason plastics are popular is because they don't do that. The more degradable you make a plastic in the environment, the less desirable it's properties are for foodstuffs.

No problems with the attached caps so far. Not sure what these people are doing really that they have issues drinking from these bottles.

Of course some people have a hard time with the changed bottle caps. There are always people who have difficulties with any type of change.

I prefer the new caps, it's more convenient to manage one object than two.

I, for one, see this as improvement, affixed cap is convenient most of the time. If it's not, its easy to tear it away.

IMO real problem with caps is that this was not invented by VC backed startup, which makes it ideological challenge to some people.