If you’ve noticed your plastic bottle cap sticking to the wrapper, you’re not alone. Bottle caps change and we explain why.
Who would have thought that a simple bottle cap could cause so much trouble? We like to attach ourselves to immutable things in our daily lives, however insignificant they may be. Until one day, poof, a small change turns everything upside down. The automatic gestures of everyday life become new puzzles and what we took for granted joins the drawer of small daily battles. This must have been going on in the minds of several people when they discovered, overnight, that the caps of plastic bottles were slightly different. More and more packaging is equipped with a new kind of technology: the cap remains attached to the packaging when it is opened.
This phenomenon does not only occur in France. The “drama of traffic jams” is spreading throughout Europe. We think things, because they’ve been like this for a while, can’t change. But it turns out that we were wrong: the bottle caps as we knew them until now were a problem and therefore had to change.
The European Commission estimates that just ten consumer products account for 70% – more than a third – of all marine litter on the planet. Among these ten problematic products are plastic caps. Thus, in the Mediterranean Sea for example, one of the most polluted seas in the world, plastic caps represent 14% of marine litter! This is why, in 2018, Brussels announced that it would take a series of measures aimed at controlling single-use plastics and, in particular, to forever transform the way we open and close bottles in Europe; measures that, at first, seemed distant, difficult to implement and not very credible in the face of the will of agribusiness giants such as soft drink brands or dairy companies. But Europe has set an irremovable deadline: 2024.
That is why it is becoming more and more common to find containers of liquids in stores with caps that are foreign to us, that seem uncomfortable to us and that we sometimes do not even know how to open. But these caps have a function: to remain attached to the container for their entire lifespan. This makes it much easier to ensure that both parts are recycled and that the cork, once separated from the bottle, does not get lost in the process and end up being thrown overboard.
In October 2022, Coca-Cola introduced the new caps on bottles of the flagship drink, as well as bottles of Fanta and Sprite. With the launch of this measure, the brand also launched a campaign to work on the most difficult part of all this change: convincing people.
Since then, some bottles bear the following message on the cap: “we are united for better recycling”. The message was the key stroke of a giant like Coca-Cola, forced to make millions of people realize that the way their flagship product works has changed for the better.
Anyway, and whatever its composition – in the case of Coca-Cola, all caps will have to be attached to bottles from next year. In July 2024, European regulations on single-use plastics will come into force and what is now a race between manufacturers to find the most functional and least offensive design for the consumer will become an obligation.