Together with Saltwater Brewery, a small craft beer brand in Florida, we decided to tackle the issue head on and make a statement for the whole beer industry to follow. We ideated, designed, prototyped and manufactured Edible Six Pack Rings. A six-pack packaging design made with materials that instead of killing animals are edible. By using byproducts of the beer brewing process such as barley and wheat, this packaging goes beyond recycling and strives to achieve zero waste. The Edible Six Pack Rings are the first ever 100% biodegradable, compostable and edible packaging implemented in the beer industry.

If we pulled it off, it had the potential to be a game-changer and get the conversation around the damage of plastics to wildlife front and center all across the globe. Way beyond beer packaging, we had the opportunity to raise awareness worldwide that plastics never go AWAY.

After numerous design rounds, variations in raw material mix and stress tests, we used five 3D printer generated molds to manufacture our first batch of 500 Edible Six Pack Rings. We documented it all.

To make our initial statement, in April, we launched the first batch of these edible six-pack rings at the brewery. The events allowed us to engage personally with consumers and give them yet another reason to choose our eco-friendly option. Consumers were able to experience first hand what our new design looked and feels like.

Once we had our story, we initiated with a post from Saltwater President on his Facebook for his network full of craft brewers to notice and spread the word ( he had 500 shares in the first hour). We then followed with an email to 100 journalists, bloggers and influencers we had identified who had covered similar stories in the past year.

Saltwater Brewery was known exclusively to local patrons in Del Ray Florida. A town of 60,000 people.

With $0 media invested and in less than 5 days:

. 110 Million social media Views, over 1.9 Million Facebook Shares and 1.3 Million FB likes.

. Over 17 Billion page views and 3.9 Billion page visits.

. Overall sentiment across all platforms was overwhelmingly positive. Positive, Excited and Inspired.

. We transformed a small brewery into a beacon for the industry to follow.

. We challenged the big guys to save hundreds of thousands of marine lives.

. We made millions understand that plastic never goes AWAY.

Source: Alexa.com, Facebook

Note: As finished editing the case study all metrics were growing at an accelerated rate.

A PR lion must be truthfully about work that depends as much in the power of the idea as in the newsworthiness potential of the story. As our industry spends more resources to do true innovation work, the invention and the story behind it go hand in hand. It’s about unlocking a conversation that is in the mind of millions of people and giving them a reason to come forward and voice their opinion. The creative solution we bring forward has the potential to influence how we do sustainable packaging with zero waste and no impact on wildlife. This work is relevant because it shows that through innovation and PR the little guys can point the finger at Governments and Big Business to motivate change that impacts our world and the one we will leave behind. There’s nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.

The world likes for the little guy to win. We had two additional aces hidden up our sleeve.

1. The tightly knitted craft brewing community.

2. Being the masterminds behind the invention.

As long as we were transparent with the stage of development we were in and clear that this was intended to be implemented at large, people would embrace the edible six pack rings.

Our target were fellow craft brewers, environmental journalists, and eco-conscious consumers.

The call to action was simple. Help a local brewery challenge the establishment with a powerful, eco-friendly idea.

Americans drank 6.3 billion gallons of beer in 2015. Fifty percent of that volume is increasingly sold in cans as craft breweries continue to grow and choose can over bottle.

Beer cans come together with plastic six-pack rings; preferred packaging design solution for years. It’s lightweight, resistant, easy to carry and provided the beer industry with a solution for years. However, most of these plastic six-pack rings end up in our oceans and pose a serious threat to wildlife for the potential entanglement and even worse, animals eat the plastic and die of hunger as their digestive systems get clogged. According to GreenPeace, 80% of Sea Turtles and 70% of Seabirds are ingesting plastic today.

The brief: To help Saltwater Brewery with an idea that made a strong local statement in their community with the potential to resonate with the beer industry and the world to aid Ocean Conservancy.