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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • As someone who has worked on embedded systems for the past 30 years: It used to be a real big deal, but for the past 10-15 years it hasn’t. We now have fully fledged multi core systems running everything. Even small embedded sensors or actuation controllers are 100+ MHz microcontrollers with oodles of flash and ram.

    Now there has been an interesting turnaround with the whole chip shortage for the past years. All the young folk are at a loss, being used to just putting powerful chips all around willy-nilly. So they turn to the old folk like me to figure out designs with less chips, running busses all over and connecting dumb sensors/actuators to a central processing unit.





  • One of the most important ones is this one: https://joint-research-centre.ec.europa.eu/jrc-news-and-updates/stemming-tide-beach-litter-2018-09-25_en

    This was the basis for the decision to mandate the caps be attached to the bottles, since they found a lot of caps and less bottles. This would indicate a lot of caps get separated from their bottles, which this change should mostly fix.

    The other was an interview with this guy: https://zwerfinator.nl/ I can’t find the interview, no idea why, but he hasn’t published the results yet (no idea why, it was scheduled to be published I think, but somehow got delayed). They were saying the new pfands really helped and the number of bottle caps have gone down. But this is highly depended on the location. For example a lot of research is focused on beaches, where there is obviously often a large delay between the deposition and the collection. In city centers this time is often much shorter, so the impact of changes are seen faster.

    So sorry to disappoint, it’s too soon for a peer reviewed study diving into this. Also with all the other changes the EU has mandated on litter and single use plastics, it would be hard to quantify which implementation has what effect.

    But my thinking was: There is for me good data showing this is an issue (which I was doubting) and the solution seems solid enough. Other changes like pfands on small bottles and cans have made a big impact (research is available for this, for example https://open.overheid.nl/documenten/ronl-8b11214f23388b3395402609d76286475b4f2908/pdf). And the people doing the research say they’ve seen results that it works. So that was enough to convince me.

    If somehow the caps being attached doesn’t lead to less caps in litter, that would be a very interesting result. Without a doubt the EU would change the regulation to fix it, depending on why they think the change didn’t work. But this would not lead to the caps being like they were in the past.



  • Thorry84@feddit.nltoMildly Infuriating@lemmy.worldEuro bottles are so much better now
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    2 months ago

    I can’t find it on mobile right now. It was a preliminary result, because the attached caps haven’t been required that long. Also most countries have implemented extra pfand systems for small plastic bottles, which also helps. So it’s tricky to say which regulation helped most.

    But there are plenty of sources of how many bottle caps there are in the streets and oceans. And how harmful they are to animals who think the small bright things are food.

    It also makes sense, instead of the bottle and the cap becoming seperate pieces of trash, it’s now a single piece. So it reduces the number of pieces if not the volume of trash.

    Also for people from the US where bottles are shredded and caps typically not recycled. In Europe the caps also don’t get recycled, but instead removed. The bottle is then checked for leaks and defects and if it passes it’s cleaned and then reused. Actually recycling plastic is hard, so this way a bottle can be used at least two or three times.

    You don’t get your pfand in many cases if the cap isn’t on, as well as the label many times. This isn’t so much needed for the recycling but important for the whole process. For example groceries are required to take in bottles, but are allowed to limit this to bottles they sell. So the barcode om the label is checked for this purpose. The label is removed in the recycling process. The cap is required to motivate people to return those and not have them turn into litter. It’s also a hygiene thing for the people handling the bottles, often there is liquid still in the bottle and without the cap it comes out during handling.

    I will find the data later when I’m on desktop.


  • Yes I hate them as well, they always get in the way and putting the cap back on is super annoying.

    However, since these bottles were introduced data has shown they work. Bottle caps were one of the most found items in trash picked up from the streets. The number of bottle caps has gone way down since these were introduced.

    So I’ve accepted them. Can’t argue with data. I’ve never returned a bottle without a cap in my life. I’ve never thrown away a cap separate from the bottle. But turns out the world is full of psychopaths who throw the cap in the street. Probably the same kind of person who throws their trash by the side of the road from their car. Fuck those people.






  • Voice actors are busy sometimes, it happens.

    I’m still mad about what Amazon did to Ray Porter on Bobiverse 5. Ray said he was super busy and might not be available, they pressured him to finish the reading on schedule anyways. Then somebody at Amazon decided the release date is going to be September 5th. So there was no reason to put Ray on a deadline and could have just let him figure out his own schedule.