CHICAGO — You know those hard plastic beer can holders?
I have 147 of them. I counted. They’re an array of colors — black, brown, silver, red, purple, yellow, pink, blue, three shades of green — and in mostly four-pack sizes, but also as six-packs.
Why do I have a rainbow collection of 147 plastic beer top holders? Churning through a fair amount of beer is one reason, but another is that I haven’t wanted to toss them in the garbage, for obvious reasons, or in recycling bins for less obvious reasons: Even when tossed in with milk jugs, newspapers and aluminum cans, they rarely wind up recycled.
