I know they’re supposed to be good for the environment. But… Holy smokes they drive me up the wall. They really do!
I had no trouble adapting when aluminum can pull-tabs got replaced by push-tabs, because it was pretty much the same movement, and I could see the immediate advantage of not getting cut by a pull-tab.
But the tethered cap is fighting decades of muscle memory in me: I’m used to taking the cap off with one hand and keeping it there while taking a swig with the other. Now I unscrew the cap with one hand, but I still have to hold the cap so it’s out of the way. It feels like drinking in handcuffs each and every time…
So unlike the pull-tab, the tethered plastic bottle cap is one of those compulsory eco solutions that constantly make you feel ever-so-slightly more miserable all the time, and I hate that because ecology only works when it brings something of value both to people and to the environment.
My city is awesome and recently decided to just stop recycling glass. You know, because we love plastic and why would we want to reward companies who use glass, the much easier thing to reuse and recycle.
It’s very hard to have glass in single-stream recycling. Glass inevitably shatters and gets mixed with tiny bits of paper making it worse than new glass and really increases the work required for the whole recycling process. It’s great to recycle in a dual-stream system, but if you can put your glass and paper in the same bin, it’s about as difficult to recycle as plastic is.
Snap!