The new plastic bottle lids are driving us mad for a good reason

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Who knew cracking open a plastic bottle could ruin your week? This once simple act now comes with a side order of drama. Try to sip from your bottle and you’ll find yourself doing unfortunate facial contortions as it pokes into your nose or prods your chin. If you’re really unlucky, you’ll catch some rogue liquid in the lid, which will then inevitably catapult all down your top, leaving you looking a bit like a sad, soggy toddler who’s still finessing their motor skills. Attempt to snap the thin attachment connecting the cap to the bottle rim to avoid repeating this mess and you risk soaking yourself again, too.

The culprit, of course, is that little bit of plastic that keeps lids attached to bottles. The new design has quietly snuck onto the soft drinks aisle over the past couple of years. If you believe its detractors, this tiny but unwelcome addition to the packaging has turned a relatively straightforward process – grab bottle, remove lid, sip and enjoy – into a high-jeopardy activity. One social media user branded this development “the worst thing to happen to humanity since the removal of the headphone jack [on smartphones]” – hyperbole, of course, but one that perhaps sums up the outsized consternation with which this change has been received in some quarters. Will you drench yourself in front of your colleagues if you dare take a gulp of water during an important meeting? Or will you simply funnel liquid all over your laptop? The possibilities are endless.

The correct way to describe a lid like this is “tethered”. The design can be traced back to a European Union directive that was initially proposed in 2018 then officially adopted the following year, with a deadline put in place: from 3 July 2024, the EU stated, caps on all non-returnable plastic drinks bottles with a capacity of three litres or less must stay attached after opening.

The purpose was not to collectively infuriate thirsty Europeans, but to tackle a serious problem: plastic waste. It’s estimated that we produce around 400 million tonnes of the stuff worldwide every single year. Plastics break down into small particles but never fully disappear. These microplastics can harm the environment, polluting oceans and soil, and can enter the human body (they’ve been linked to health problems such as endocrine disruption and even cancer, and have also been found in placentas).

What might seem like an infuriating change seems much more reasonable when you start to explore the impact of our soft drinks habit. When lids are “untethered” from bottles, they often get dropped or lost, potentially blown by the wind or carried by the rain into drains or rivers that flow out into the sea; bottle caps are among the most common forms of plastic waste found on Europe’s beaches. And even if they do get to a recycling bin and then processing plant, their diminutive size is a problem. “Caps are filtered out through sieving drums because they are too small,” explains Ross Lakhdari, a circular economy expert at PA Consulting. “Generally, any item smaller than two inches in any dimension risks being lost during this screening process.”

If these lids remain attached to something bigger, then, they’re less likely to be lost as waste or end up in the ocean, where they can prove perilous to wildlife such as turtles and birds. Unfortunately, animals often confuse them with food – no wonder plastic caps were ranked among the top five most harmful types of ocean rubbish by the NGO Seas at Risk.

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Despite the plan seeming like a no-brainer, the EU directive did initially get some pushback from Big Soft Drink. Various multinationals claimed that it would be too tricky and expensive to make new, compliant lids, and that it would be better to concentrate instead on improving recycling processes. But since the directive was introduced, drinks manufacturers have been slowly rolling out the change in order 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 prevalent. Countries can decide their own “effective, proportionate and dissuasive” penalties for those who break the rules.

But hang on, I hear you ask. Britain is famously no longer part of the European Union (Brexit means Brexit, blah, blah, blah). So why are these tethered bottles cropping up here? Did “take back control” not apply to our beverages? Detachable lids are in fact completely legal in the UK (that’s why you might still come across the odd bottle with an old-style lid). It just makes little to no financial sense for major drinks companies to produce special attachment-free bottles (like the soft drink equivalent of a post-Brexit blue passport) specifically for the relatively small British market. They’d effectively have to operate two production lines at once, which would be far more costly. And this way, should the UK ever introduce a similar rule of its own, they’ll already be covered.

As with anything that bears a whiff of EU regulation, these mildly irritating lids have also become something of a lightning rod: a punching bag for those who don’t want to have a bit of a rant about accidentally soaking their T-shirt in Fanta, but instead want to start hand-wringing about overbearing bureaucracy and the nanny state.

On social media, you’ll find references to “woke bottle caps” (sometimes ironic, sometimes very much not). Earlier this year, The Spectator published an article making the grandiose claim that “the EU has ruined plastic water bottles”.

This bottle-related EU bashing is just as fervent… inside the EU. Tethered lids even got a namecheck in the run-up to Italy’s recent European Parliament elections, with deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini citing the caps as proof that his country needs “less Europe”. Yes, getting your face splashed with Sprite is pretty irritating, but it’s hardly the stuff of stirring election campaigns, is it?

Perhaps it’s not the new lids that are the problem, but our own incompetence – could it be that all we need to do is get a bit better at using them? A viral TikTok video recently seemed to crack the code, showing us that, actually, we’ve been opening bottles all wrong: we just needed to pull the lid over the top, so that it sits neatly to the side, out of trouble. And if you can’t master that? May I suggest sipping with care, and trying to think about happy sea creatures, rather than your squashed nose?