I’m sure you’ve noticed.  It’s in their ads.  They’re going Green.  Reducing packaging amounts that will lessen the volume dumped in landfills.  Rejoice America!  Plastics bottlers far and wide are joining forces and slashing global warming by putting less plastic in bottles!  Who wuddah thunk?  And what a great P.R. campaign to boot!

There are two equations to this ‘life is going to be better’ propaganda machine that I’m having a problem with.  I’ll let the flimsy, barely stands up and feels like I’m drinking out of a zip lock baggy perception fall by the wayside.  I’m sure the engineers at Aquafina were up late trying to get that ratio just right.  However designers messed with the wrong end of the bottle in my opinion.  The cap.  In an effort to squeeze out another few percentage points of plastic reduction they went for the one thing that my five digits need to wrap around to quickly open a package.  Bad move designers. You score a big fact 0 on the C.U.F index (Consumer Usability and Functionality).  It’s bad enough that allergy medicine packaging is cruel and unusual punishment (ever noticed the plastic-to-pill ratio?), now accessing the water I need to wash it down with is adding to the effort.  I’m beginning to think that it might be easier to peel open the side of a water bottle than to tear open a Claritin blister-pac.

My name might be Geakz, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have a grip – both literally and figuratively. With this leaner cap profile anyone with some potato chip grease or buttery popcorn fingers will need to take another pass at cracking the seal on their beverage of choice.  And don’t forget about Seniors, anyone suffering from arthritis, or any other physical handicap.  As an example, let’s take a look at the bottled water from Dasani, below.

Here we see the old style on the left vs. the leaner and greener bottle on the right.

Now let’s take an up close and personal look at the caps.

You think I’m off my rocker, right?  For perspective, I’ve included a shot of my ‘normal sized’ fingers holding both caps below.  You can also see that the amount of gripper lines (unofficial term) of the old version (right cap), have also been whittled away, in favor of some larger gripper lines (left cap).

So now you’re thinking the elevator didn’t go all the way to the top floor for ol’ Geakz.  Well put this in your pipe and smoke it:  What percentage of the plastics “savings” has been passed on to you, the consumer?  That’s right.  None. Zip. Zero. Nada.  So now we can be proud of companies touting a Greener, less plastic-y America.  Cut back on raw materials used, save money and charge the thirsty public the same amount.  Now THAT’s a business model that can get any consumer “twisted-off”.