To hate the new attached bottle caps

I find they make it harder to open and close the bottles. I have severe arthritis in my hands and sometimes cannot open them at all, I also find it difficult to get them on straight again as well.

officially it's called a "tethered cap" and was EU directive to help pollution in the sea. The major bottle producers, such as coca cola etc decided to keep the legislation for the UK as well as their EU supplies.

I'm in the bottling industry 😀

Thank you Minticecream. Very happy to stick with Tango Fruit Twist!

They're not at all difficult to manage.

It would depend what drink you're looking for. If it is orange pop for example, Fanta have them, Tango have the old school screw tops (well they did last time I checked. I don't drink pop often).

I hate them too.

I’m totally with you here, we have just been on holiday and found them so frustrating when wanting to drink out the bottle, or pour from it. Either people are happy to recycle or they’re not - I don’t think this will make a difference.

any recommendations of brands that don’t have them?!

Lidl branches in Glasgow have had these machines since last summer, taking cans and plastic drinks bottles. As long as the item has a recognised bar code, you get 5p back for every item.

Also, all these lidless hummus pots, coleslaw etc - has anyone else noticed that the expensive lines still have lids? Apparently only povvos are required to make adjustments for the sake of the environment. If you buy co op finest there is no need.

Design packaging that does what it needs to.

Get stretchy silicone lids.

They are doing so eventually, though the date keeps being pushed back.
The countries where I have seen this scheme, use a reverse vending machine, pop the bottles into a chute, scanned and get a money off coupon to redeem against new bottles. Though only works if the label and barcode are attached.

They are annoying. I never had a bottle leak before these were introduced; now it's happened several times. I think the caps being narrower means they don't thread properly.

Surely the answer to plastic waste is to use less plastic, not to continue to make plastic items that are shit.

As ever with these green washing bright ideas - like cream cartons with no lids FFS - it means more mess and inconvenience for the end customer. Or, in the case of plastic bags, just straight up increased cost.

You can snap them off you know.

I used to have issues with these lids when they first came out but there is a way of using them that means I now think they are great. So when opening the lids you open and push them back until they stick. This means no liquid gets in the cap and the cap is fully clear of when you drink. When you are replacing the lid you pull it up slightly stretching the attached plastic and then the lid closes really easy. Now I do it without thinking and it is easier than it used to be before the attached lids. Please try it.

They're awful when you have arthritis. Too narrow, too sharp, need too much dexterity to put them back on again if by some miracle you manage to open them, assisstive aids don't work with them.

Obviously nobody wants the marine life to be harmed, but it's infuriating that a very small number of people then make something as simple as using a drink bottle a lot more difficult, irritating, awkward, less efficient than it should be for so, so many decent people.

Even people who don't bother recycling plastic bottles will usually put them in a normal bin rather than tossing them somewhere dangerous to wildlife.

I put all of my used plastic bottles in an appropriate recycling bin, so if they are getting into the oceans, that's the council's irresponsibility and not mine - much as they like to apportion the blame for this to all of us who just responsibly use (and dispose of) them.

They are to stop marine life choking to death on the bottle cap.

So yes, they are annoying, but YABU as they stop fish and birds having a painful death.

There is a good reason behind it -plastic bottles lids end up in rivers and oceans and end up being swallowed by marine life.

www.kcl.ac.uk/news/comment-why-plastic-bottles-now-have-their-caps-attached

The additional benefit is that the bottles then become worth something, so even if the idiots who bought them just chuck them on the ground, somebody else can spot them, pick them up and then earn themselves a few quid over a relatively short space of time.

Kids used to earn pocket money by collecting the glass bottles and taking them back to the shop.

Schools and charities could organise litter picks and make a bit of money at the same time.

I don't buy bottled drinks very often, and I regard it as a treat when I do, so I wouldn't notice or mind a few pence more on the price.

The elephant in the room would be simply returning to the old bottle deposit scheme, whereby you pay an extra amount on top of the price of the drink and then later return the bottle to any participating retailer for your money back or, effectively, to 'carry forward' your deposit to your next bottle.

We wouldn't need to return to glass bottles; I can't see why it wouldn't work with modern plastic bottles as well.

The additional benefit is that the bottles then become worth something, so even if the idiots who bought them just chuck them on the ground, somebody else can spot them, pick them up and then earn themselves a few quid over a relatively short space of time.

I think this design is very much a symptom of somebody in a closed room solving a potentially negative result of people using something carelessly whilst remaining completely oblivious to the reason why and how people use them in the first place.

The classic example of this is those taps in public toilets that you have to push down for water to come out - not the genuinely genius ones that give you 15 seconds of water with one press but the ones where, the instant you stop pushing down, the water supply slams closed.

Did this design significantly reduce the amount of water wastage from people leaving taps on after using them? Yes, great result; well done! Did it render the taps frustrating, no longer fit for purpose and thus cause people to not bother using them at all in the first place? Sadly, also yes.

I agree that, like so many things, they've made it less useful and more irritating for the people who behave well, whilst the people who simply don't care will just continue not to care. It's all very well designing them so that the lids get recycled at the same time as the bottles, but that's all a bit pointless if you're the kind of selfish idiot who just chucks your empty drinks bottle in the canal or pushes them into somebody's hedge, rather than actually bothering to keep them until there's a recycling bin.

They are very irritating. As others have said if you get a juice or smoothie type drink it sticks in the lid and then drips down your clothes when you drink.

It really seems to me that this is a sledgehammer - nut solution. Out of all the issues facing the world today who came up with this as the one to fix? And then messed up the “fix” by putting in place this terrible idea?

This has never happened to me. How is juice getting in the cap? It's upside down when it's closed, then you open it and it's tipped up and pushed to the side.

The first thing I do is cut them off.