The Pop-up Top

Where has the recent trend for pop-up tops in water bottle lids arisen from? Who likes them? I can’t stand the pop-up top and don’t see any benefits it might have against the old-fashioned screw-on lids.

I hate the way pop-out tops release their water so slowly into your mouth – if you’re thirsty you want a drink of water, not a suckle of mother’s milk from a modern artificial teat! The worst culprit I’ve come across so far was an olive-oil style drizzler from an Evian brand water bottle. This puritan Comptroller-General of water rationing took the “everything in moderation” motto so far as to only grudgingly release drops of its precious contents onto your tongue. The slow drip of water falling onto my tongue when drinking from this bottle reminded me of the punishment Hades conferred on Tantalus in Greek mythology – there I was with a gushing 600mL of water so close and yet as I tried to drink it receded into a mere dribble.

Of course there’s a really simple solution to my problem: just un-screw the pop-up top as if it were a normal top. But although useless as a means of delivering refreshment, these pop-up tops are nevertheless superior at coming open inside your bag and slowly but surely fertilising all paper products and any dormant mould spores with a healthy spring shower. Which if left overnight will leave your bag with the delightful verdant smell of new life.

 But all this begs the question: what purpose do pop-up tops truly serve? I fear the answer has something to do with marketing different water products to different consumers in such a way as to get the maximum out of those willing to pay more without losing those customers who aren’t. Because some people will pay more for something they don’t need if it differentiates itself as somehow better “quality” whilst others can’t afford to.

Image via Wikipedia

Tantalus - tantalisingly close to fruit and water

From this frivolous complaint I could make a serious environmental point on a wasteful society – pointless production and pointless consumption all in the name of marketing. But then that would lead us onto the question of why we’re bottling water and transporting it to different locations around the world in the first place.