Plastic bottles with non-detachable caps mandatory across the EU from July

(Patria) - The European Union is introducing new rules - every plastic bottle will have a cap that cannot be detached from it.

The caps will remain attached to the bottle, and people complain that they bother them while trying to drink from the bottle and make it harder to pour drinks into glasses.

By July this year, all EU countries must phase out detachable caps on plastic bottles up to three litres and replace them with non-detachable ones.

This is part of an EU directive published in 2018 aimed at reducing the amount of plastic waste.

Namely, plastic bottle caps have so far been detachable and often ended up in inappropriate places in the environment, not being recycled.

Research estimates that the production and incineration of plastic released more than 850 million tonnes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in 2019.

The EU now wants to at least slightly mitigate this by introducing non-detachable caps on plastic bottles. And the new caps on bottles are just one in a series of measures the EU plans to implement.

The European Parliament wants to introduce only renewable packaging by 2030 in order to reduce the amount of waste in Europe by at least 15 percent by 2040.

And first, they want to change some small things that accumulate several tonnes of waste annually.

For example, all those mini-packagings of sugar, spices, ketchup or butter that we get in hotels will no longer be allowed from 2030 unless they are made of pure paper.

They also plan to introduce changes in stores - fruit and vegetables weighing less than one and a half kilograms will no longer be allowed to be packaged in plastic, and plastic bags for fruit and vegetables in stores will become a thing of the past.