Yes, pretty sure this is EU law now. It occasionally comes up on the German-speaking Internet too. Some people seem to be very bothered by this.

I thought it was annoying at first, but now that I've gotten used to it, it's perfectly OK IMO.
They've also improved the system a little bit compared to the original.

This has been in every European country I've visited (mainly the Nordics).

Same in Sweden and I fucking hate it. Even the milk has this shit. You try and pour the milk and suddenly the thing flaps in front of the stream and milk gets everywhere.

I tear these fuckers off the bottle/carton/package every time, idgaf. I don't lose my caps in the ocean like some idiot. Not that hard to screw it back on.

I'm from Canada just visiting France on holidays, we don't have this, our bottle caps fall off

...and UK

Yep, we also have them in Italy

So like, 80% of the consumer base, then. It's already bad if it's only 20% anyway.

Consider how it's one of the most common trash on beaches according to the study they made this decision on, there's enough brain damaged slobs to warrant this

A heap of pollution is 2nd/3rd world. They dont have garbage collections let alone recycling centres. Single use plastics just need to be banned.

You guys should rejoin the EU.

I believe it’s intended to make the material easier to process for recycling.

Not exactly, the reason is that the caps often get thrown everywhere for some reason? So it's to protect the environment from that, and this was the solution EU decided on. I bet UK uses it for compatibility with EU, so "evil" EU is still deciding changes in the UK even though UK is no longer a member.

I never got the pushback. It makes so much sense and the mild inconvenience opening it is compensated by not having to put the cap down. Change scary I guess

I'm France on holiday, and the bottle caps from where I'm from (Canada) are designed to fall off and polute the oceans.