I don’t collect pull tabs and I did mean to imply that they are of any worth to me. I was just trying to underline the logic according to which some charitable entities might have come to encourage people to collect them.
Let me explain it another way : charity asks people to send in whole cans, people start collecting them but they find that it quickly becomes bulky, smelly, leaky, etc. At some point a collector looks at the huge bag of cans he have been collecting for weeks or months and takes a minute to evaluate its dollar worth. He might very well tell himself : the hell with this, I’ll recycle these smelly cans and eventually send the charity some money instead, it makes more sense. I’m sure you can see how the “sending the money instead” part might get forgotten about pretty quickly - by that time, the charity has become an equal competitor to all other fund-raising charities.
If, on the contrary, the charity asks people to collect tabs, our charitable collector might put them into an easily manageable pot or bin for months and months before eventually sending them away to the charity.
Of course, tabs are worth less than whole cans, but the fact that they are much easier to manage and cost free for the collector might lead more people to actually collect them and send them in, resulting in more aluminium, overall, for the charity.
Put in even simpler words : requesting whole cans will quickly becomes assimilated with a request for money, but a complicated one.
As for the postage or gas cost of sending in the pull tabs, it might not make economic sense in a global way, but since these costs are paid by the collector, it has no impact on the charity. What’s important to the charity is to maintain the willingness of the collector and, of course, the actual volume of aluminum collected in a year.
More global economic sense does not result in more money for the charity. Not by a long shot. Hence the circumvoluted funding strategy. No?