This infuriating new EU rule has everyone flipping their lid

A new EU directive banning fully detachable lids on plastic bottles has angered soft drink consumers everywhere, says an orange-juice soaked Steve Allen

I sit here furious, looking like I’m lactating Sunny Delight. My white shirt, clean on today, has a yellow stain down the front from a bottle of orange juice. EU Directive 2019/90 has ruined my day.

The offending drip came from the tethered lid. Some orange juice had stowed away in there and when I tipped the bottle back for a swig it took the chance to attack.

In the old days we could fully remove the lid before drinking but now plastic bottle lids are attached by a little bit of plastic because – apparently – we’re idiots who don’t know how to use bottles any more.

The intention of EU Directive 2019/90 is to increase recycling rates. Some people didn’t know that the plastic lids were recyclable along with the plastic bottle even though they were both clearly plastic. Now we have bottles where you can’t remove the lids and I am sending a size 16 neck shirt to landfill.

The Coca-Cola company first rolled out attached lids in 2022. They now have tethered lids on brands including Smartwater, Oasis, Fanta and Dr Pepper. 

It’s the greatest assault on ergonomic design since the paper straw – the bottle version of having your shoelaces tied together. You open the bottle, excited to quench your thirst, only to fumble the execution as you pulled the lid and the bottle came with it.

Even the Mesopotamians, who invented the first bottles around 1500 BC, knew the lids should be removable. This latest update means you either have to have your nose squished by the lid, your chin cupped, or you hold it out to the side and dribble some down you.

It’s not just Coca-Cola doing it now. This month the EU are banning detachable lids on bottles 3l or under. The UK is technically exempt, which would have been a Brexit benefit, if it weren’t for economies of scale meaning we’ll get the mass produced bottles too.

Will this vastly reduce the amount of plastic going to landfill? It’s unclear.

Recycle Now estimates that an average of 35.8m plastic bottles are used each day in the UK but only 19.8m are recycled. However not all of those were recycled without lids and it’s only a few grams of plastic being saved from landfill by this scheme.

Research commissioned by the industry body Unesda Soft Drinks Europe Found that tethered caps could cause 50,000 to 200,000 tons of additional plastic to be used.

While the benefits are unclear, what’s not is the rage the change has caused consumers, with many taking to social media to vent their frustration. One soft drink enthusiast wrote on Twitter that: ‘Tethered caps are the worst thing to happen to humanity since the removal of the headphone jack.’

It could prove more effective than the sugar tax in tackling obesity, since everyone will end up with more fizzy drinks down their fronts than in their stomachs. Personally I’m hoping it’s a secret plan to make the bottles so annoying to drink out of that everyone remembers to recycle those caps once the classic design returns. But if it is a conspiracy, the EU’s keeping a lid on it.

Steve Allen is broadcaster and comedian as seen on The Mash Report and the Steve N Allen (Almost) Daily podcast