Major Brewery Carlsberg to Replace Plastic Rings With Recyclable Glue

Danish beer company Carlsberg is set to be the first in the industry to phase out the plastic rings connecting its cans, The Guardian reported Thursday.
The company will replace the rings with a glue that withstands cold temperatures but can easily give when you are ready to break open a cold one. When you're done, the glue can be recycled along with the can.
Carlsberg vice president of product development Myriam Shingleton told The Independent that the company had worked for three years on developing an alternative to the plastic rings that environmentalists have warned about since the 1970s.
"Environment and sustainability have always been very important to us," Shingleton said.
The ring-less cans will be available in the UK's Tesco supermarkets by Sept. 10 and then will spread to Norway.
Environmentalists have long warned that the rings from six packs could strangle marine life and urged consumers to cut them open before throwing them away, The Independent reported.
But the ring phaseout will also tackle the broader problem of ocean plastic pollution by removing 1200 UK tons (approximately 1344 U.S. tons) of plastic from the ocean each year, according to Carlsberg's estimates. That's 60 million plastic bags' worth of plastic.
"This is an interesting development and will help cut down the amount of plastic on our beaches and in our seas. These kinds of can yokes are regularly found in small numbers on our beach cleans," Marine Conservation Society senior pollution policy officer Dr. Sue Kinsey told The Guardian.
She said the last Great British Beach Clean found 100 in one weekend.
Carlsberg isn't the only company to try to find an eco-friendly solution to the plastic ring problem.
Florida's Saltwater Brewery developed a compostable ring alternative that would biodegrade if it ended up in the oceans, CBS reported in May.
That project was a collaboration with Eco Six Pack Rings (E6PR), New York ad agency We Believers and a Mexican biodegradable manufacturer called Entelequia.
Saltwater Brewery is the first to use the new rings, and offers them with the Screamin' Reels IPA at the Tasting Room and South Florida outlets Publix, Total Wine & More, Whole Foods Market, Lucky's Market and ABC Fine Wine & Spirits.
"More than 50 percent of beer consumed in the U.S. is sold in cans," We Believers co-founder Marco Vega told CBS, "a trend that is only expected to grow in the near future. Most of the material used to hold these cans is still plastic."
E6PR hopes to change that, though, and scale up its biodegradable alternative to soda and other six-pack cans, eventually replacing the plastic version, Fast Company reported.
Plastics: The History of an Ecological Crisis https://t.co/GSzv0Z9g3X @wwwfoecouk @GreenpeaceUK— EcoWatch (@EcoWatch)1524129607.0
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The speed and scale of the response to COVID-19 by governments, businesses and individuals seems to provide hope that we can react to the climate change crisis in a similarly decisive manner - but history tells us that humans do not react to slow-moving and distant threats.
A Game of Jenga
<p>Think of it as a game of Jenga and the planet's climate system as the tower. For generations, we have been slowly removing blocks. But at some point, we will remove a pivotal block, such as the collapse of one of the major global ocean circulation systems, for example the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), that will cause all or part of the global climate system to fall into a planetary emergency.</p><p>But worse still, it could cause runaway damage: Where the tipping points form a domino-like cascade, where breaching one triggers breaches of others, creating an unstoppable shift to a radically and swiftly changing climate.</p><p>One of the most concerning tipping points is mass methane release. Methane can be found in deep freeze storage within permafrost and at the bottom of the deepest oceans in the form of methane hydrates. But rising sea and air temperatures are beginning to thaw these stores of methane.</p><p>This would release a powerful greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, 30-times more potent than carbon dioxide as a global warming agent. This would drastically increase temperatures and rush us towards the breach of other tipping points.</p><p>This could include the acceleration of ice thaw on all three of the globe's large, land-based ice sheets – Greenland, West Antarctica and the Wilkes Basin in East Antarctica. The potential collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is seen as a key tipping point, as its loss could eventually <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/324/5929/901" target="_blank">raise global sea levels by 3.3 meters</a> with important regional variations.</p><p>More than that, we would be on the irreversible path to full land-ice melt, causing sea levels to rise by up to 30 meters, roughly at the rate of two meters per century, or maybe faster. Just look at the raised beaches around the world, at the last high stand of global sea level, at the end of the Pleistocene period around 120,0000 years ago, to see the evidence of such a warm world, which was just 2°C warmer than the present day.</p>Cutting Off Circulation
<p>As well as devastating low-lying and coastal areas around the world, melting polar ice could set off another tipping point: a disablement to the AMOC.</p><p>This circulation system drives a northward flow of warm, salty water on the upper layers of the ocean from the tropics to the northeast Atlantic region, and a southward flow of cold water deep in the ocean.</p><p>The ocean conveyor belt has a major effect on the climate, seasonal cycles and temperature in western and northern Europe. It means the region is warmer than other areas of similar latitude.</p><p>But melting ice from the Greenland ice sheet could threaten the AMOC system. It would dilute the salty sea water in the north Atlantic, making the water lighter and less able or unable to sink. This would slow the engine that drives this ocean circulation.</p><p><a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/atlantic-conveyor-belt-has-slowed-15-per-cent-since-mid-twentieth-century" target="_blank">Recent research</a> suggests the AMOC has already weakened by around 15% since the middle of the 20th century. If this continues, it could have a major impact on the climate of the northern hemisphere, but particularly Europe. It may even lead to the <a href="https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10871/39731?show=full" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">cessation of arable farming</a> in the UK, for instance.</p><p>It may also reduce rainfall over the Amazon basin, impact the monsoon systems in Asia and, by bringing warm waters into the Southern Ocean, further destabilize ice in Antarctica and accelerate global sea level rise.</p>The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation has a major effect on the climate. Praetorius (2018)
Is it Time to Declare a Climate Emergency?
<p>At what stage, and at what rise in global temperatures, will these tipping points be reached? No one is entirely sure. It may take centuries, millennia or it could be imminent.</p><p>But as COVID-19 taught us, we need to prepare for the expected. We were aware of the risk of a pandemic. We also knew that we were not sufficiently prepared. But we didn't act in a meaningful manner. Thankfully, we have been able to fast-track the production of vaccines to combat COVID-19. But there is no vaccine for climate change once we have passed these tipping points.</p><p><a href="https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-risks-report-2021" target="_blank">We need to act now on our climate</a>. Act like these tipping points are imminent. And stop thinking of climate change as a slow-moving, long-term threat that enables us to kick the problem down the road and let future generations deal with it. We must take immediate action to reduce global warming and fulfill our commitments to the <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Paris Agreement</a>, and build resilience with these tipping points in mind.</p><p>We need to plan now to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, but we also need to plan for the impacts, such as the ability to feed everyone on the planet, develop plans to manage flood risk, as well as manage the social and geopolitical impacts of human migrations that will be a consequence of fight or flight decisions.</p><p>Breaching these tipping points would be cataclysmic and potentially far more devastating than COVID-19. Some may not enjoy hearing these messages, or consider them to be in the realm of science fiction. But if it injects a sense of urgency to make us respond to climate change like we have done to the pandemic, then we must talk more about what has happened before and will happen again.</p><p>Otherwise we will continue playing Jenga with our planet. And ultimately, there will only be one loser – us.</p>By John R. Platt
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