In spring 2016 a small craft brewery in Delray Beach, Florida, announced six-pack rings made from brewing leftovers instead of plastic. Saltwater Brewery and the New York advertising agency We Believers said the rings could break down naturally and would not harm a fish or turtle that swallowed a piece. The idea spread around the world within days. Here is what the rings actually were, what happened to them next, and what the wider story of plastic can holders tells us about packaging and the sea.
What Saltwater Brewery actually made
Conventional ring carriers are stamped from low-density polyethylene, a soft, stretchy plastic. Saltwater’s version replaced it with a pressed material built from barley and wheat by-products left over from brewing, the spent grain that most breweries sell as animal feed or throw away. The rings were shaped to clip over the tops of standard cans and hold six of them together, the same job a plastic carrier does.
The brewery made three claims for the material: it would hold cans as well as plastic, it would biodegrade, and if an animal ate it, the animal would come to no harm. The first prototypes went on the brewery’s Screamin’ Reels IPA. Saltwater’s president Chris Gove told reporters the goal was to influence “the big guys” in the beer industry and nudge them toward something similar.
The launch video above was part of the campaign. It mixes footage of sea turtles and seabirds with shots of the new packaging, and it was made by the agency as much to win attention as to explain the engineering. That is worth remembering when reading the bolder lines that followed it around the internet.
The first run used Saltwater’s own cans. The ring material is tan and slightly rough, closer in look to a cracker or a sheet of pressed cardboard than to plastic.
From “edible” to “eco”: what happened after 2016
Turning a viral prototype into a product took about two more years. According to Green Matters, the project was funded in 2017 by three backers: We Believers, the Mexican biodegradable-materials supplier Entelequia, and private investors from the beverage packaging industry. In January 2018 the rings went on sale on Screamin’ Reels six-packs at the brewery and in South Florida branches of Whole Foods, Lucky’s Market and Publix, as a real-world test of how the material performed in shops and coolers.
Along the way the product changed its name. What began as the “Edible Six Pack Ring” became the Eco Six Pack Ring, or E6PR. The developers explained that a carrier travelling through warehouses, trucks and store shelves can pick up dirt and contaminants, so promising that it was safe to eat was not something they could guarantee. That small rename is the most honest part of the story: the material was meant to be harmless if it ended up in the wrong place, not a snack for wildlife.
Early carriers were embossed with the words “Edible Six Pack Ring”, the original name before the switch to E6PR.
Cost was the other hurdle. The brewery admitted from the start that the rings cost more than plastic. Its head of brand, Peter Agardy, called the project “a big investment for a small brewery created by fisherman, surfers and people that love the sea.” The plan was that prices would fall if larger brewers adopted the rings and production scaled up. Smithsonian Magazine noted at the time that Saltwater was still the only brewery using them, and there was no published independent testing of their strength or their safety for animals.
Why six-pack rings became a symbol of ocean plastic
Plastic ring carriers appeared in the 1960s and within about a decade had largely pushed out paper and metal holders. By the late 1970s they were turning up on beaches often enough to become a recognised kind of marine litter. The concern was entanglement: a bird, seal or turtle can push its head or body through a loop and be unable to get free, and a young animal that keeps growing can be slowly constricted.
This photograph of a freshwater turtle caught in a ring carrier is one of the images that made the problem famous. Pictures like it drove both the campaign and the earlier laws on ring design.
Governments reacted early. Vermont banned non-degradable ring carriers in 1977, and by 1991 twenty-seven US states had followed with similar rules. In 1994 a federal rule was proposed requiring plastic ring carriers to be degradable. Manufacturers responded with photodegradable plastic that becomes brittle in sunlight. That helps a ring fall apart rather than stay intact for decades, but the pieces do not vanish: they become fragments and eventually microplastics, which animals can still swallow.
Six-pack rings also need a sense of proportion. The Wikipedia summary of research on the subject points out that they are a relatively small part of marine litter compared with lost fishing gear, cigarette butts and other plastic items. They became a symbol partly because the image of an animal trapped in one is so easy to understand.
Checking the statistics that came with the story
The 2016 coverage of the rings was often wrapped in dramatic numbers. Several of them do not hold up, and they are worth correcting because they keep circulating.
- “80% of the plastic we throw away ends up in the ocean.” This is not correct. Most discarded plastic goes to landfill, incineration or recycling. The figure appears to be a garbled version of a different estimate, that a large share of marine litter starts on land rather than at sea. Those are two very different statements.
- “40% of the ocean is covered by plastic.” Also wrong. NOAA explains that the so-called garbage patches are not islands of trash and would not show up in satellite photos. They are areas where small floating plastic pieces are more concentrated, spread through the upper water column, with borders that shift with winds and currents. You could sail through one and see little on the surface.
- “99% of seabirds will have plastic in their guts by 2050.” This one has a real source: a 2015 study in the journal PNAS estimated that about 90% of seabird species had eaten plastic and projected 99% by 2050 if nothing changed. It is a model projection, not a count, but it is a serious scientific estimate.
- “One million birds and 100,000 marine mammals die each year.” These round numbers have been repeated for decades and attributed to various groups. They are hard to trace to a measured study, so they are best treated as rough, unconfirmed estimates.
None of this makes plastic pollution less real. Clear numbers simply make the argument stronger than inflated ones.
Other ways brewers have dropped plastic rings
Saltwater was not the only company looking for an answer. Several approaches have reached shelves since 2016:
- Glue instead of rings. Carlsberg introduced its Snap Pack in 2018, holding cans together with dots of adhesive and a small carry handle, after about three years of development.
- Paperboard. Cardboard toppers and baskets have become common, and PepsiCo announced in 2023 that it would move to recyclable paper-based carriers.
- Rigid recyclable clips. Some small breweries use chunky HDPE can carriers, such as those made by PakTech, which can be reused or recycled and have no stretchy loops for an animal to get trapped in.
Each option has trade-offs in cost, strength when wet, recycling access and how well it survives cold, damp coolers. The E6PR’s contribution was less a single winning product than a very public push that made big brewers and suppliers take the question seriously.
This campaign image shows a sea turtle nibbling a piece of the ring. It was staged to illustrate the idea, not to suggest that people should feed packaging to animals.
What you can do with a six-pack ring today
Whatever carrier your drinks come in, the most useful habits are simple:
- Snip every loop of a plastic ring before you put it in the bin, so that if it escapes it cannot trap an animal.
- Check whether your local recycling accepts rigid carriers or paperboard, and keep them out of the general waste when it does.
- Never throw any packaging into the sea or a river, including products labelled biodegradable or edible. “Biodegradable” usually means under particular conditions, and cold seawater is rarely one of them.
- On a beach clean-up, pick up rings, fishing line and netting first: these are the items most likely to entangle wildlife.
Saltwater Brewery’s rings will be remembered as one of the clever environmental campaigns of the 2010s. The honest takeaway is a modest one: a small brewery showed that a ring carrier could be made from brewing waste, and the conversation it started helped push the industry toward alternatives.
Sources: Images and video: Saltwater Brewery and We Believers. Smithsonian Magazine: Brewery introduces edible, biodegradable six-pack rings; Green Matters: Florida brewery rolls out eco six-pack rings (2018); Wikipedia: Six-pack rings; NOAA: How big is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch?; original report via True Activist.
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