Out of all plastic waste items, bottle caps may be the worst: Once detached from the bottle, they travel with the blowing wind, littering parks, streets, beaches, rivers, and oceans – and often winding up in the stomachs of a variety of animal species that mistake them for food, sometimes with fatal results. And even in a landfill, plastic caps still pose a threat to animals such as seagulls, which scavenge through the masses of trash looking for food.But it doesn’t have to be this way – and perhaps it won’t be for much longer, now that technology company Origin Materials has introduced what’s being called the first tethered PET caps ever made. The innovative cap enables 100 per cent mono-material PET packaging to improve recycling circularity for the world’s most recycled polymer, and also addresses legislation for tethered caps: European Union (EU) regulations now require that caps stay connected to bottles — and Origin is the only company doing it with recyclable PET plastic.“The EU Single-Use Plastic Directive, which came into effect last month, mandates that caps stay connected to bottles throughout the European Union,” said John Bissell, co-founder and co-CEO of Origin, which is headquartered in West Sacramento, Calif. “Our PET cap innovations are perfectly suited for that regulatory environment, and frankly any environment. We expect many other regions to introduce their own tethered beverage cap requirements as well, following the example of the EU. With our PET cap technology and manufacturing systems, we are extremely well positioned to address a $65-billion caps and closures market that consumes billions upon billions of caps per year that today can’t be recycled into new caps, only downcycled.” (ICE TORONTO)

Fonte notizia: plastics.ca