The new EU initiative to Solve Plastic Waste is stupid, will do nothing, may be counter-productive and loads of people think it's totally cool anyway

Sometimes, it is the little things.

Since 3 July of this year, all plastic bottles in the EU must have so-called tethered caps – that is, bottle caps which cannot be removed from the bottle, even after unscrewing.

They look like this …

… and they are a pain in the ass.

The purpose of the regulation is to reduce plastic ocean waste, although nobody really expects tethered caps to do anything about that:

A packaging expert, Markus Prem from Kempten University of Applied Sciences, has sharply criticised the mandate … The fixed bottle caps are not necessary and make no sense, he said. “Does this really do anything for the planet or even for Europe? And my clear answer is: no.” It is pure activism to assuage a guilty conscience …

Prem says that the amount of discarded lids that end up in the sea or in rivers and lakes is extremely low. “The industry has been forced to invest billions in new machines, among other things, for an effect that is virtually impossible to measure.”

The Federal Association of German Beverage Wholesalers said in response to inquiries that manufacturing plants would have had to be converted or rebuilt. “We are assuming costs in the millions” …

The proportion of plastics washed into the sea from Europe and America is small, says Prem. The overwhelming majority comes from Asia. “We would have to start somewhere else if we really wanted to make a difference.”

That’s not from some crazy conspiracy theory climate denying Russian disinformation blog, by the way. It’s an article from the deutsche-presse agentur, via Der Spiegel – a magazine that absolutely loves environmental regulations. Even they know this is dumb.

Retrofitting machines to stamp out the new caps is said to cost about 181,000 Euros per production line, and the tethered caps themselves cost 0.2 cents more to produce than their untethered counterparts. Even if they work as planned, there is very little scope for them to improve plastic pollution – first, because as Prem notes Europe does not contribute very much plastic to the oceans at all; and second, because various EU states, including Germany, already have bottle deposit systems. In these countries, bottle caps are generally returned with their bottles and don’t constitute a meaningful source of litter.

It gets worse, though. As Gernot Kramper at Stern points out, the tethered caps have one potential and one very real downside. The potential downside is that, because they make drinking from bottles obnoxious, they will encourage some consumers to pour bottled beverages into glasses before drinking them. If enough of people do this, the environmental costs of washing all those cups will more than offset any environmental benefit. The real downside is that the tethered caps use more plastic than untethered caps. Thus the EU regulation is actually increasing production of the very material it is aiming to reduce.

You might ask how we ended up with this dumb rule that makes an everyday consumable less functional and that will either do nothing for the environment or will hurt it more. The answer is the constantly escalating Eurocrat hysteria about packaging and plastics, which from the beginning has focused not on solving the problem of plastic pollution (that’s just too hard), but on degrading the consumer experience in service of lending the false impression that Something Is Being Done. The pointless tethered caps follow pointless bans on plastic straws (which contribute such a vanishingly small share of waste to the oceans that nobody has been able to measure the effect of their prohibition) and pointless-at-best bans on disposable plastic shopping bags (which on balance have probably made things worse).

They have also been in the works for a very long time. In fact they go back to 2012, when the European Commission began looking into marine litter and funding studies to measure it. You must always tremble when a bureaucratic behemoth like the European Commission gets up to measuring things. Various surveys culminated in this 2016 report on Marine Beach Litter in Europe, which inspired the present tethered cap mandate. This report is the source of numerous media stories claiming that plastic bottle caps are among the most frequent sources of waste on European beaches.

Here is some of the data that report contains for the North Sea, where most of the beaches are governed by countries with bottle deposit systems:

Caps and lids (most of them probably plastic) account for only 7% of litter on North Sea beaches, while bottles account for only 2%. The EU regulation, in the best-case scenario, will remove an average of 33 plastic bottle caps per 100 metres of beach; the remaining 10 caps will stay behind, tethered to their discarded bottles. At the cost of millions if not billions of Euros, the EU will have addressed a grand total of 5% of the already sparse plastic litter on the North Sea coastline. And that’s the best possible numerical reckoning. Were we to reckon by volume, the reduction would be far less.

In the Mediterranean, where the beaches are far more thickly settled, almost no countries have bottle deposit systems. There, caps and lids account for 14% of the surveyed marine litter, while drink bottles account for 12%.

It’s very unclear whether the mandate will do anything in the Mediterranean at all. The caps will be tethered to their bottles, but those bottles will still be on the beach.

Plainly, bottle caps constitute only a minor share of plastic pollution on European shores, and in the global context European bottles caps are wholly insignificant. The European Commission enacted their tether mandate not because loose bottle caps are a pressing problem, but because they are the only item in these litter surveys that a simple regulation could easily address. Bottle deposits would do far more to reduce litter on Mediterranean coasts, but implementing an EU-wide deposit system is extremely complicated and will take years. Otherwise, there is no easy solution for the vast majority of beach litter, and so our Eurocrats took their regulatory hammer and brought it down on the only nail they could find. Who cares if it does anything, who cares if it makes the problem worse in unexpected ways, and who cares about assessing the environmental impact of bottle caps on beaches in the first place.

Yesterday, after I explained all of this on Twitter, a whole world of people crawled out of the digital woodwork to tell me why tethered bottle caps are actually a good idea though, really they are, they are the best thing ever. They told me that it will save the birds, that it will save the turtles, that it will reduce beach plastics in Oman, that it is actually a design improvement, that it will enhance child safety, that now they won’t have to worry about losing their precious bottle caps, that tethering bottle caps to bottles will make cleaning beaches easier, that it is smart, that littering is bad, that actually they’re not annoying at all, and that nobody should complain because this is not a big deal. They are still typing their dumb post-hoc justifications into my replies as I write this. A lot of people just love regulations, they love them indiscriminately, they love them even if they don’t make sense, and when you show them why they’re idiotic they’ll spend hours dreaming up all manner of adventurous and invented defences for them. That’s even more depressing than the idiots in the European Commission who came up with this dumb rule in the first place.