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Design Problem: Creating Tethered Bottle Caps That People Don't Hate
As the tethered-cap law comes into effect, backlash ensues
This month a new law went into effect in the EU, requiring that all plastic bottles (up to 3 liters) incorporate tethered cap designs. The initiative is meant 1) to reduce litter (plastic bottle caps are reportedly the most-littered object on EU beaches), and to ensure that caps are recycled along with bottles.
Although the law has only just gone into effect, it was announced five years ago, and manufacturers have started rolling out their tethered cap designs over the past year.
Unsurprisingly, a subset of people hate them. Some users complain that the caps prevent you from effectively drinking out of the bottle, as you can see in this image:
Others tear the caps off and create a mess:
Design problem, or user behavior problem? I'd say the former. At least one packaging company, Switzerland's Corvaglia, has come up with an intelligent design. In the image below, it's the design on the right:
As you can see, the cap and hinge is designed to "park" the cap against the shoulder of the bottle, keeping it out of the way. However, I imagine people will need to see a "Did you know?!?" TikTok video to figure out how the design works.
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Let's go the other way and make the caps as difficult to use as possible. Help cut down on plastic bottle use.
If you can't beat them, join them ;-)
I just returned from Europe a couple days ago and here are my thoughts on these caps. The first bottle of water I bought, I'll admit I ripped the whole cap off, thinking it was just a manufacturing error, but I quickly realized my mistake. In practice, I like the idea, but it's obviously a design exercise that's still in its infancy. What we're seeing now are mostly stop-gaps, and they'll likely only improve with time. There were several different designs I encountered, but nearly all of them suffered from the same ergonomic issues. You had a weird opening motion of twisting and then having to lift the cap off and away from the mouth of the bottle, and then the reverse motion of closing the bottle was even more annoying. Some caps flipped out of the way reasonably well, others seemed to refuse to lock back and were constantly in the way leading to another issue. That issue is that about 50% of the time that you opened them, you would need to reposition the bottle in your hand to not have the cap interfere with your sip. I say "nearly" all, because I encountered one cap that seemed to be an improvement on the cap as opposed to a traditional twist cap but worse as many of these were. This cap was on a water bottle, apologies for not remembering the brand, but it was exclusively a flip cap. There was no multi-stage motion to open it, just press your thumb against the lever on the cap and push. It could be opened, used, and closed with a single hand and flipped down to lock against the bottle allowing me to drink from any angle without worrying about hitting my nose, cheek, or bearded chin against it. My only concern with this design would be how it would fare compared to a traditional twist cap if it were dropped. I'd gladly introduce the last cap I mentioned to other markets, but everything else needs some more time in the oven.
aluminum bottles gross me out, not sure why, could be the wide mouth nature of most of them, but everyone loves cans, Coke, Liquid Death, La Croix. why not just go can for all of them?
I like being able to close a bottle and put it back in my bag while on the go or just to reduce the possibility of a spill while at my desk or home. I imagine other people have similar concerns about going can-only.
maybe more people will switch to aluminum!