I found this about halfway home from work last night, just sitting on the ground beside the sidewalk on 18th Street South. This is the second time in two weeks that I have found an intact six-pack ring, or drink yoke, just laying on the ground. Both were in a couple hundred metres of each other.
If you find one of these laying on the ground, please pick it up and dispose of it properly, which means cutting it or pulling it apart so that none of the rings is still intact, including the small holes also. These rings are insidious little devices when left out in nature. Wildlife get themselves tangled up in these and end up choking or starving to death, or in some cases becoming deformed as their bodies try to grow around the obstruction.
Such a thing happened to Peanut the Turtle here years ago in Missouri. Her body continued to grow after getting caught in the yoke. She will be shaped like this for the rest of her life. Lucky for her it didn’t kill her, but its an unfortunate outcome that could have been avoided. Many animals are not as lucky as her.
Now, drink yokes are not the most pressing issue out there, and there are probably bigger issues for humans when it comes to the environment, but this one seems so unnecessary. From the person who tossed this drink yoke out irresponsibly, to the drink distributor, and the yoke manufacturer, there are a number of people perpetuating a product that we really have no need of.
Please stop buying drinks that are packaged in this fashion. Cardboard packs recycle very easily and if improperly disposed of, do not threaten wildlife in such a horrible way. To the politicians, it would probably be fairly easy to just ban these things form sale in your jurisdiction, be it municipal or provincial. To those that say that politicians have more pressing matters, I would agree, however, I tend to think that our elected representatives can do more than one thing at a time, so this would not take away from other importantvmatters.
Mayor Decter Hirst, MLAs Reg Helwer and Drew Caldwell, and Premier Selinger; I would ask all of you to consider getting rid of these unneeded consumer waste product in Brandon and in Manitoba. Drink manufacturers have other options; banning these hurts nobody.
It’s not the two drink yokes that I found within meters of each other that scare me… it’s the ones I didn’t find.
