Here’s a Company Making Six-Pack Rings Animals Can Actually Eat

Everyone’s seen the sad photos of animals getting murdered by plastic.Plastic holding knives to the throats of baby turtles, plastic beating a bird with a lead pipe, plastic yanking the teeth of a whimpering seal with pliers. Plastic is a real murderous asshole, but it’s a murderous asshole that makes our lives more comfortable. That’s why we keep making it and pretending that we care about animals while drinking from straws that end up so far up a turtle’s nose they’re fingerbanging the medulla oblongata. Ew!

There is (at least) one company who wants to fix (at least) one real issue: those plastic rings that hold your beers together. You know, the ones that you’re supposed to cut up before recycling, just in case they end up around the shell of some poor unsuspecting turtle who doesn’t want or need a corset, because when it comes to turtle shells, big is beautiful, damn it!

SaltWater Brewery is a Florida-based craft microbrewery that hooked up with a startup called E6PR (Edible 6 pack rings) to make something so simple it’s strange it’s not already in place all over the world: “six-pack rings that that can either biodegrade or serve as a snack for wildlife.”

Of course, as with any new operation, making the rings cost a bit more than they expected, and since they a craft microbrewery and not, say, Budweiser, they didn’t exactly have to buy in bulk. Now what they’re hoping for is that other breweries will like the idea, realize that it’s a very simple solution to a very obvious problem, and buy into the idea, making it cheaper for everyone—and with any luck, it’ll be one small step in the right direction. But even the longest journey is made up of small steps, and each one of them counts.