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Say goodbye to charity collections of plastic bottle caps. Local communities’ efforts to collect bottle caps for purchasing equipment for the disabled will soon be a thing of the past, according to Prawo.pl. The reason is the EU Single-Use Plastics (SUP) directive, which states that from mid-2024, all plastic caps in the European Union should be factory-attached to the packaging of drinks, such as bottles or cartons.
As reported by Prawo.pl, some companies in Poland already comply with this directive. These changes are explained by environmental reasons, as they allow the entire package to be recycled and reduce the amount of plastic that could end up in the environment, citing a post on a beverage producer’s website.
Collecting bottle caps was seen as a way to learn about the selective waste collection at the source and to earn some money for charities, according to Szymon Dziak-Czekan of the Polish Recycling Association. But since Poland has had a separate collection of municipal waste for several years, collecting bottle caps separately no longer makes sense, he said.
“A bit of an ecological scam“
Piotr Szewczyk, deputy director of the Orli Staw Municipal Waste Disposal Plant, called charity collections of bottle caps “a bit of an ecological scam” and a source of information chaos.
“We gain a small amount of collected caps, but we lose the rest, because the unscrewed caps end up in the small fraction in the sorting plant, and nobody recovers them from there.”,
explained the expert, as quoted by Prawo.pl.
According to the Prawo.pl website, charities will soon lose part of their income due to the new directive, but fortunately, it won’t be a significant amount.