The issue is with opportunity costs. I’m guessing transporting and melting down the bottle tops may always work out to cost more in resources than the equivalent in money (even if the donator assumes the cost, the charity loses out from the larger cash donation the person could have made), but it serves a dual purpose. It helps people to appreciate recycling and it differentiates the charity from others. IMO there are more interesting ways: maybe providing a recycling bin near the charity and encouraging people to donate once they’ve made a deposit, or hosting some dance, or perhaps “advertising” free by some local sports team or newspaper.
Much of the effort of collection and bulking up may be so broadly distributed as to be effectively free - if it piggybacks invisibly on other processes that would have been performed anyway, for example, the local school here collects plastic bottle tops to raise funds for their swimming pool - for a start, they (and other nonprofit benevolent organisations) seem to be getting a generous rate from the polymer processing companies - I assume they’re treating it partly as a corporate donation, but it might also be helping them to tick some statutory green agenda boxes. Anyway…
There are hundreds of pupils - each of which has parents and a network of parents’ friends and families collecting bottle tops.
The effort of setting aside the bottle tops is free - arguably cheaper than trashing them.
If they require washing, this is also free as it is just added into the dishwashing, without causing it to be more than a single load.
Passing the occasional bag of bottle tops to a parent of a child at the school is free.
Delivering them to the school is free - the kids or parents do it as they’re going there anyway.
(I guess it could be argued that there is some trifling quantity of non-free calories being consumed by this human effort - but in practical terms - that probably means the individuals in question don’t put on quite so much weight that morning as they would otherwise)
So by the time any kind of measurable expenditure has to happen, the items have already been bulked up to a mass that it is cost effective to collect and pay for.
Are you sure the school is getting paid a scrap fee and doesn’t just have a special arrangement with the recycling center for a donation based on the caps? Out of curiosity I was trying to find a value for the caps but came across this instead:
Snopes is just plain wrong there - probably not on the thrust of the article as regards chain emails about specific appeals, but certainly incorrect in the claim that “such caps are the wrong form of plastic to be recycled”.
HDPE is one of the most easily recycled plastics. Of course, not all bottle tops are HDPE, but a lot of them are - including the tops of plastic milk bottles and most of the screw caps from soft drink bottles.
And it’s a material that is in demand from recycled sources. Prices have dropped a bit lately, perhaps to a level too low to make it properly worthwhile, unless polymer recycling companies are still offering a generous rate to charities.
I thought if we collected enough pull tabs, Bill Gates would buy me a computer. Or do I have to email them to 100 people first?
My how we wander from the topic. I live in an area that charges a refundable tax on items deemed to be recyclable. ie. pop cans, bottles (glass & plastic) etc. Several years ago my mother volunteered at a local hospital auxillary that raised money for special projects. One such was the collection of tabs for sale as bulk aluminium and the money was designated to buy wheelchairs. I was told that it took about a million tabs to buy one chair. We bought 12 in a little over 5 years. Many people I know find it a novel thing to do and save me baggies full of tabs which I then drop off at the gift shop in the hospital when visiting. No wasted time or gas except for the one fella that picks up from the hospital, stores in his garage and takes to the scrap dealer when he has a truck full. And you still get the full refund for the can.
Looking at it more, it appears caps aren’t number 2 plastic (HDPE) but number 5. I get 5 collected curbside but I gather that that is not common. I guess most places don’t take it which I assume led to Snopes’ confusion.
Milk bottle caps and those from single-portion bottled drinks (7-UP, spring water etc) are resin code 2 (HDPE) - at least they definitely are here in the UK. I have performed extensive research on this myself (cite)
Caps larger than about 30mm in diameter (Peanut butter jar lids), or with deep screw threads, or with living hinges (hair conditioner), mechanical nozzles (ketchup) or otherwise complex structure, or difficult closure tolerances, tend to be polypropylene (resin code 5)
He refers to milk bottle caps as being HDPE. That matches with what I read:
http://www.recyclingnj.com/recycle/caps.html
The second link explains that if it’s the flexible push down lid, it’s HDPE. But the rigid caps on soda are number five.
That information is wrong (or at the very least, not true in my locality). Sorry.
I have some screw top caps in my hand right now - a black one from a half litre bottle of pepsi, a green one from a small bottle of Tropicana OJ, a selection of different coloured ones from milk bottles and a couple from small lunchbox sized bottles of off-brand cherryade and other drinks. All clearly marked with resin code 2.
Well, to me it’s now satisfactorily proven that the internet does horrible things to people: I’m intensely curious if there’s a difference between soda caps in the US and the UK and if so, why.
Not sure - it sounds like there’s a difference. There are still PP bottle caps on some drinks here - they tend to have a soft inner seal disc which looks to be made of soft PE (possibly silicone) - and I understand this makes them hard to recycle.
The HDPE ones don’t have the inner seal disc (presumably the polymer is flexible enough to seal against the neck of a PET bottle all on its own) - and manufacturers seem to be increasingly switching from PP to HDPE.
10 cents a can
and it’s illegal to return out of state cans
they put up signs at all of the return machines shortly after that Seinfeld episode noting how it was illegal
To follow up on the charity recycling point - I found thison the website of a neighbouring local council
and GHS Recycling have a page here- which says:
But that’s a truly vast amount of plastic tops for not very much money - they individually weigh almost nothing. I think the rate used to be quite a lot higher.
I presume they’re still making a comfortable profit when they sell the HDPE regrind material.
I was happy to see that @agesnn correctly listed that Massachusetts Shriners regularly run a successfull pull tab campaign. The entire can is not collected for two primary reasons: removing the tab still allows the donor to redeem the entire can for the $.05 deposit, and the pull tabs are easier to collect and transport than would be the can. Pull tabs are collected and turned in by hand; they are not mailed and therefore not subject to postal rates. I have also been told that the aluminum used for the pull tabs is of a higher strength than the can and is worth more, pound for pound, but I can not confirm this independently.
What seems like an insignificant amount of aluminum adds up quickly. From the Aleppo Shriner’s web site (http://www.alepposhriners.com/ads/TabCollectionTriFold.pdf) we have the following information:
It takes approximately 1,300 tabs to equal one pound.
Over 15 tons of pull-tabs have been collected by Shriners all over Eastern Massachusetts.
In one year, the Aleppo Shriners of Wilmington, MA, raised over $310,000 to provide transportation, housing and food for patients and their families.
The reason I mentioned postal rates being greater than the aluminum scrap value was because the Shriners website linked to in this thread specifically solicits the donations via drop off and mail.
Also, the third fact you listed has nothing to do with pop tabs. Lets assume that all the tabs in fact 2 were collected in Wilmington, MA in one year (which is not what it says . . it reads as if it’s an all-time reginal stat). 15 tons is 30,000 pounds. For that to translate to $310,000, the Shriners would have to be receiving $10 per pound of aluminum. Scrap aluminum goes for closer to $0.50 a pound.
So for however long they’ve been collected tabs in the entire region, they’ve raised closer to $15,000 by redeeming them. But the Shriners in one city were able to raise more than 20 times that in a single year via other means. It sounds like they’ve found some much more efficient fund-raising methods than having people handle tens of millions of pop tabs.
I want to note this line at the end of the document you referenced: