Kickstart: Cutting plastic rings

PepsiCo Inc. announced Aug. 24 that it is eliminating plastic rings on its multipack beverage products in North America. If that sounds familiar, that may be because it's not really that new.

PepsiCo said in its announcement that its switch to paper-based systems for packages of Pepsi, Gatorade, Mountain Dew and other products would be "the first beverage company to commit to a North American roll out of paper-based solutions to replace plastic rings across multipacks that have traditionally used plastic rings." But it follows a 2022 announcement from Molson Coors Beverage Co. that it would eliminate plastic rings in North America by the end of 2025.

In 2020, PepsiCo announced a pilot program to eliminate plastic rings in some markets.

Plastic can rings have been a prominent environmental target since at least the 1980s, when consumers were instructed to carefully cut them apart so birds wouldn't get caught up in them. (Or declare them a lucky talisman if you're a Happy Feet fan.)

Efforts to completely eliminate them have picked up the past few years. In 2018, Danish beer maker Carlsberg Breweries A/S introduced its Snap Pack approach that uses glue on six packs, followed by Molson Coors and now PepsiCo.

I'm not sure what kind of a sound a Venova makes, but it makes that sound with ABS.

The Venova — described as being similar to a tenor saxophone, but with far fewer keys — took a silver award in the 2023 IDEA awards from the Industrial Designer's Society of America, handed out Aug. 23.

Musical instrument company Yamaha says the washable ABS provides "simple maintainability and recorder-style fingering help inexperienced players learn to play the instrument."

The annual design awards cover a range of products that use plastics, for industrial settings such as Aubo collaborative robots and a range of medical devices.

You can find the full list of winners here.

There are a lot of competitors out there to be the perfect replacement for a single-use plastic straw. A hot dog has to be among the silliest.

At least Oscar Mayer's "hot dog straw," now available for pre-order, is made of silicone and not an actual hot dog.

The straw marks the one-year anniversary of a somewhat viral video of a guy at a baseball game hollowing out a hot dog to use as a straw. (He used an actual straw to hollow out the hot dog, so it's not as if he didn't have one. So … you do you I guess?)

The silicone straw resembles a hot dog in shape and coloring, but of course is designed for sipping and not eating. (Oscar Mayer notes that the straw can be cleaned and reused. Unlike, well, the actual hot dog.)

"For over a century, Oscar Mayer has proudly produced some of the finest hot dogs for eating, and now we're proud to have made the best one for drinking," Zack Roif, part of the advertising team involved in the project, told our sister paper Ad Age.