As someone who has grown up on the Mississippi coast, I've been around water most of my life. I absolutely love the sea and all of its inhabitants, and I have seen firsthand what litter, oil, and waste can do to these precious ecosystems and the innocent creatures that live in them. Creatures such as turtles, seabirds and other adorable ocean-dwelling animals are helpless when it comes to the things that can end up in our waters. One common issue is the six-pack rings that hold beer or soda together. These rings can trap turtles and even choke animals if they are eaten. Thankfully a brewery in Delray Beach, Florida, Saltwater Brewery, has engineered a solution.
Saltwater Brewery has always wanted to do more than just sell beer. From the start the company — founded by local fisherman, surfers and ocean lovers — they wanted their brewery to reflect the sustainable and environmentally friendly practices they believed in. They started donating the grains used in their brewing to local farms to feed cattle. But it gave them another idea for how to pay it forward to the planet.
“The ocean has been our jewel, so we’ve always wanted to give back to it,” Saltwater co-founder Chris Gove said. The brewery has created edible six-pack rings that feed, rather than kill, marine life if the rings end up in the ocean and an animal happens to eat it. The rings are created from beer byproducts during the brewing process such as barley and wheat and are completely safe for humans and fish to eat. The rings are also completely biodegradable and compostable, which to me makes them even cooler
The idea was sparked after a product photo shoot when We Believers founders Gustavo Lauría and Marco Vega noticed the amount of waste sitting in the garbage.
“When we started to really think about what [waste] meant, we ended up finding how big of a challenge it is for the marine environment,” Vega said. “That’s why we have an island (of floating plastic) in the Pacific the size of Texas. ... We go on about our merry lives, but that is out there circling in the Pacific, and we have to do something about it.”
The rings take about three months to disintegrate completely, but they begin to decompose the first hour they spend in the water. One of the founders of Saltwater Brewery has commented that since the idea has gone public over 50 other breweries have contacted them asking to partner with Saltwater Brewery.
The only drawback to the plan is that these new six-pack rings are a bit more expensive to manufacture than regular rings are. But the company hopes that customers will be willing to pay a little more in order to help the environment and animal life.
