Collection Corner

Ring in the changes

When packaging beers, brewers most often use glass or aluminum containers. As for aluminum cans sold in six packs, the plastic rings that keep the cans together are typically made of a low-density polyethylene (LDPE) plastic.

In an effort to help save seabirds, sea turtles and marine mammals, a Delray Beach, Florida-based brewery says it has created what it calls the first completely biodegradable and edible six-pack rings for holding beer cans.

Saltwater Brewery says it produced 500 prototypes in April and plans to have a system in place to produce 400,000 edible six-pack rings each month. The brewery designed the rings that are made from byproducts of the brewing process: wheat and barley.

Picking up parks

Visitors to America’s national parks can enjoy distinct sights, from waterfalls and wilderness to meadows and mountains. Unfortunately, the hundreds of millions of park visitors leave behind 50,000 tons of waste that is landfilled each year.

To lessen what is landfilled in national parks, auto manufacturer Subaru, together with the National Park Service and the National Parks Conservation Association, has launched its Zero-Landfill Initiative, “with the historic goal of making garbage in our national parks a thing of the past,” according to Subaru.

The initiative has started with pilot programs in Yosemite in California, Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming and Denali National Park in Alaska. To determine how national parks can eventually send zero waste to landfills, the Zero-Landfill Initiative will include waste audits as well as reviewing recycling, organic material composting, hazardous waste management and visitor waste behaviors.

Coastal cleanup

Television sets, refrigerators and toilets are all conveniences people can find inside their homes. Yet, during the Ocean Conservancy’s 2015 International Coastal Cleanup, these were among the more unusual items found in near-shore environments. Nearly 100 TV sets, 28 refrigerators, 39 toilets and 54 bicycles were collected by about 800,000 volunteers. In addition, volunteers picked up more than 18 million pounds of trash in total, equivalent to the weight of more than 100 Boeing 737s, the Ocean Conservancy says.

The Ocean Conservancy’s Ocean Trash Index is an item-by-item, location-by-location database of trash found in near-shore environments. Cleanup coordinators have taken note of the pattern of waste items collected during these efforts and are using this information to independently attempt local solutions worldwide to divert solid waste from entering marine environments.