What’s the deal with the plastic rings that hold six-packs of beer and soda together? Is it true that animals get caught in them? Is it important to cut the rings apart in order to prevent needless deaths?
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Six-pack rings first floated into public awareness in the late 1970s when environmentalists began calling attention to the problem of waterborne trash, also known as marine debris. The masses of floating or beached crud visible on many shores not only look gross, they threaten wildlife. More than 260 marine species can ingest or become entangled in man-made waterborne junk, among them turtles, birds, mammals, and fish. During the 1998 International Coastal Cleanup, volunteers hauled away 10.4 million items of trash from coastlines around the world (including 1.6 million cigarette butts).
Marine debris comes in all shapes and sizes, but six-pack rings became the poster child of the cleanup movement early on after several photographs of ring-strangled seabirds were widely reproduced. Anecdotal accounts also focused attention on the rings: Javna’s book cited a 1988 cleanup of 300 miles of Texas beach (beaches surrounding the Gulf of Mexico are unusually trashy) that turned up 15,600 sets of rings in three hours.
