Talk:Six-pack rings

(The plastic)

for recycling, what type of plastic is it made of?— Preceding unsigned comment added by 208.70.19.10 (talk) 22:12, 14 October 2008‎

I would like to know that, too. I've been putting them in the trash. Is it necessary to cut them if they are just going to an inland city landfill?
--Bsah (talk) 21:00, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Per the Hi-Cone website [www.hi-cone.com], they are made out of LDPE. LDPE is typically marked #4. While too few groups currently recycle #4 plastic, hopefully your local waste collection group will. Cutting rings when they are recycled or put into proper waste collection is not typically beneficial. Even when they are carelessly littered, the rings are photodegradable and will become brittle over time so again, cutting is not a real aid. If you are interested in the statistics showing where the carriers rank in the area of potential animal entanglement, you can visit the Ocean Conservancy site for annual data. [1]
6PHC (talk) 14:57, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

   A colleague has added

Notably however, very few species of wildlife can survive 30 to 90 days painfully entangled in constrictive six-pack rings so it is advisable to cut the rings before discarding them.

as a new last sent of the latter 'graph of the sec'n accompanying article's secn "Environmental concerns". I confess to some embarrassment that i intended to complain about this addition sullying the pretty-good documentation for the previous revision of the section: my inspection intending to back up that estimate of mine, shows that the existing documentation is already fairly bad. Nevertheless, the new text is not just undocumented but PoV, while the old is certainly not enuf worse to overcome several reasons for LIFO treatment of such problems.
   The biggest problem word is "advisable", a term whose degree of applicability critically depends most of all on the values of the person being advised, and also importantly on the absolute and relative probabilities of sustained entanglement. Other issues include the neither supported nor quantified terms "very few", "painfully", and "constrictive". ("Constrictive" is probably simply false: such plastic is not like torturers' materials that constrict by shrinking and perhaps hardening, as they hydrate or dehydrate, but in fact the plastic is stretched and tends to stay deformed by what is inserted thru it, more than holes in shell, bone, coral, etc., knotholes in wood, or knots and tangled loops in plant stems). Finally, it is implausible that the degree of advisability is independent of whether "discard" means thrown into a biome, or thrown into a responsibly managed trash bag. (And who wants to believe, without reliable sources, where throwing them into a bonfire would fall on the spectrum between those two?) Finally, what is the human and wildlife impact of drinkers carrying, and to some extent losing, cutting instruments into outdoor consumption sites?
   I am removing the new sentence, confident that further discussion of alternatives, in this talk section, can only produce a less horrible alternative. In particular, treating it as a controversy rather than pretending to settle values-dependent "advice" is far more consistent with WP's purposes.
--Jerzy•t 06:50, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

This article needs an overhaul as it's citing vastly outdated sources and suggests that rings are not a serious problem. Given that the major drinks companies are still producing things things by the millions, and we have microplastics showing up in animal and human guts, I'd say they are still a major issue. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 108.162.100.91 (talk) 15:28, 12 December 2018 (UTC)

Straight Dope refs

   The following citations are (except for 3a) from the accompanying article's secn "Environmental concerns" in the current revision; the following revision dates and times reflect the edits in which the respective URLs were added. (Some markup has changed, but not URLs.) They are in order of appearance among the 8 refs currently in the article, and therefore not in every case in order by date of being added to the article.

1. (revn @ 12:57, 20 September 2007): "Should you cut up six-pack rings so they don't choke sea birds?". The Straight Dope. 1999-07-16. Retrieved 2010-09-15.

   Note: the above URL is (at least now) redirected by the straightdope server to the URL immediately below.

2. (revn @ 16:14, 1 July 2012): The Straight Dope: - Should you cut up six-pack rings?
3. (revns on 7 July 2011):

   a. @ 19:51: "The Truth About Plastic Ring Carriers". sevenwave.com. Retrieved 2010-11-10.

   b. @ 19:58: "The Truth About Plastic Ring Carriers". The Straight Dope. Retrieved 2010-11-10.

   The basis for "sevenwave.com" is suggested by accompanying you-tube text saying "7th WAVE and Chris Agos" (and indirectly by "uploaded by BrianCBurkhart54 on Nov 30, 2010", since BB is a partner named at sevenwave.com). I see no basis for "The Straight Dope"... except that the same user provided both versions; one possibility is that they got confused by the first mention (see 1 above) of "The Straight Dope" on our page (the 2nd mention had not yet been added), and accidentally overwrote with it, losing "sevenwave.com".
   

--Jerzy•t 09:02, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

Does more need to be said about the six-packs that six pack rings hold together?

   I removed the following prose from the Dab Six pack at 10:53, 26 July 2012:

A six pack is a type of multi-pack made of six canned or bottled drinks, typically a soft drink or beer, which are sold as a single unit. Cans are usually connected with plastic six pack rings, HDPE Can Carriers, shrink wrap, or paperboard.

Similarly, soft drinks or beer is also often sold in a twelve pack.

   The same text was previously removed by one of our conscientious colleagues at 14:23, 25 February 2012.
   This similar text was removed at 00:34, 6 July 2007:

A "Six-pack" is a set of six canned or bottled drinks sold together: aluminum cans are held together by a yoke, and bottles are stored in cardboard carriers with three on either side of a handle in the middle.

   Such removals will continue as occasion arises, bcz the job of a Dab is aiding navigation, to the exclusion of covering any of the topics being disambiguated. It appears that no one has tried writing the article that i would title Beverage six pack, but if someone does so -- or expands six pack rings to the point where the rings themselves are a subtopic and the title should perhaps change -- then the Dab page can be changed to mention whatever title comes to have the content best covering this sense of "six pack".
--Jerzy•t 11:22, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

Why are they now attached half way down the can?

I came here to see why the yolks are now typically placed between one third and half way down the can. Formerly, they where placed high on the neck of the can, but now more often than not, the yolks are lower. Is there any particular reason for this? Would be nice to see information about the placement of the yolks in the article. David Humphreys (talk) 00:06, 4 June 2014 (UTC)

Why are they now attached half way down the can?

I removed unsourced writing about cutting up the six pack rings. This is just propagating a myth. See the straight dope article. 2018 Nat Geo article mentions that there's no known source for this 100k animals killed. AP isn't a source. Jeff Axelrod (talk) 02:42, 6 December 2020 (UTC)