Since July, all plastic bottles sold in EU must have tethered caps – they remain attached after unsrewing and interfere obnoxiously with attempts to drink. This is to save the oceans, altho Europe contributes almost no plastic waste to the seas. The big source is Asia.
Retrofitting bottle factories to manufacture the new caps is estimated to have cost millions of Euros. They also, ironically, tend to use somewhat more plastic. Packings experts/engineers have told the press multiple times that this will achieve nothing & merely annoy people.
The new regulation goes back to this 2016 EU Commission report on Marine Beach Litter in Europe, compiled by someone named Georg Hanke who I'm sure is a total shit. 
It compiles various surveys, ultimately showing that plastic bottle caps ... are a numerically frequent but otherwise minor source of ocean litter – vastly outpaced by things like fishing nets and random polystyrene debris.
Hard to do anything about that stuff. The EU Commission looked at this report and picked the one thing they thought they could easily fix with a regulation, so now our plastic bottles have to suck. I know this is a small thing but it's basically the entire EU in microcosm.
One thing that would really help, not only here but with global warming hysteria and virus lunacy and so many other things, is if we could get these ret@rds to stop measuring and surveying every last fucking thing. Every data trove, every report, becomes a new obnoxious project.
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