Nearly 300,000 people have signed a petition calling on beer brand Carling to follow Guinness and Carlsberg in ditching plastic ring pulls, which can harm the environment and wildlife.
The Change.org petition, signed by 298,234 at the time of writing, asks Carling to “stop polluting our planet and making animals suffer”.
Simon Harris, a 35-year-old blogger from Essex, began the petition seven months ago when Carlsberg announced it would replace ring holders with dots of glue to hold cans together.
Harris told HuffPost UK he’d targeted Carling because it’s one of the UK’s biggest lager brands – and he was inspired to petition the company after seeing the damage ring pulls can do to wildlife. He added the petition had seen a boost in signatures since Guinness announced on Monday that it, too, would remove plastic ring holders.
[Read more: Carlsberg Replaces Plastic Can Holders With Recyclable Glue, Saving 1,200 Tonnes Of Plastic]
“I saw a picture of a turtle stuck in a ring, and the shell had begun to recede and take on the shape of the ring,” he told HuffPost UK. “The shell literally bulges either side and the poor animal has been stuck in it that long that its entire body has changed. That was one of the images that made it hit home.”
Harris hopes Carling will accelerate its efforts to keep up with the other major brands based on the weight of the petition, “they don’t want to be seen to be lagging behind given how many millions of cans they sell in the UK.”
HuffPost UK contacted Carling to ask whether it had any plans to ditch plastic ring pulls, but it had not responded at the time of writing.