I thought this question might have been addressed here before, but a search didn’t reveal anything, so if it’s been answered, please accept my apologies and put me out of my misery by answering once more…
My SO’s daughter’s daughter is a cheerleader and they raise money by saving only the poptops off aluminum cans, not the cans themselves.
Now, my feeble brain seems to remember that the poptops are the purest part of the can abd are never recycled, and this is what makes them so valuable, but why? I mean, at .25 cents a pound (last time I checked) the cans themselves should bring in more dough, right?
Search on Google for “collect poptops”. You will find alot of links to places that are doing the same thing. Most notably, the Ronald McDonald House accepts them for donations.
Perhaps it’s just easier to collect the tops - less messy (no pop spillage) and less chance to get cut on them. Also easier to store than un-crushed pop cans.
If those cheerleaders actually receive anything for those poptops, you’ll let us know, please? (I was going to put some kind of smilie here, but I really would love to hear from someone who can claim firsthand knowledge of this scam.)
At work we have some anonymous collection bins for pop tabs with a hand-written sign saying that for each pop tab collected, a kid will get a minute on a dialysis machine. It doesn’t say that’s a fair trade; there may be a company that’s donating the time on the machine in change for recycling the tabs. I haven’t had the heart or the energy to bust somebody’s tiny little good-hearted bubble and put up a post-it note with the link to the snopes page.
Yes, Keeve I most certainly will. As I indicated in the OP, I am puzzled too, but all our other co-workers are handing my SO baggies filled with poptops, and they’re going somewhere! Ostensibly, they’re getting cash to help them go to cheerleading camp.
And Ethilrist: I have seen the same sign posted onto an old milk jug. If this is a scam (the dialysis) then it’s a particularly cruel one and needs to be stopped.
The dialysis IS a scam- and a cruel one. Not only snopes, but others have debunked it.
Now, it is true that this UL has been around so long that now “life is imitating art”. Altho most of the collect pop-tops contest are really only a very poor way of collecting scrap aluminum- some companies are now really donating stuff for Pop-tops- however, usually for “special” poptops, not everyones. (and curses on them all for doing this, and confusing the issue)
Like Snopes said (and bless them)- it would be 30 times more efficient to collect pennies than pop tops.
It’s not exactly a scam, since nobody gets a significan amount of money from it. It’s more of a hoax, perpetuated by gullible but good-hearted folks.
And the Ronald McDonald House only collects them because it’s less of a nuissance to do so than it is to try to explain to people that it doesn’t make any sense.
And this hoax continues to be perpetuated today, almost 20 years later.
I was in our office breakroom and noticed a flyer on the bulletin board soliciting people to collect aluminum pop tops and send them to one of our facilities in California, because supposedly, a hospital in the area would give patients families a night in a hotel for every pound of tops collected. There was an effort to have other locations collect the tops and mail them to our California facility.
At $0.40-$0.50 per pound, it costs more to mail or ship the tabs to our California facility than the value of the tabs.
I spoke with the head of our employee interaction team and asked her to take the flyer down and contact the originator of the flyer and ask them to stop making the solicitations based on false information.
I noticed also recently, that while Ronald McDonald house still accepts the pop tabs, they are attempting to get people to give “pennies for a purpose”. A pound of pennies is worth more than 3x a pound of pop tabs.
There’s truth in the notion that the tabs are easier to recycle, though whether that’s done in practice is another story. The tabs are just a chunk the same kind of aluminum as the rest of the can, but unlike the rest of the can they’re not lined with a corrosion-inhibiting epoxy (including BPA) on the inside or coated in paint on the outside. The tabs can theoretically be melted straight down, whereas the cans need to be shredded and burned before melting to remove those coatings. Plus as @ZipperJJ noted, they pack well compared to uncrushed (or even crushed) cans, and aren’t full of mold and bug-attracting soda residue.
? They aren’t ?
The tang is connected to tab: are people actually separating that before collecting? And, back-in-the-day, the parts were all made from the same pre-coated stock.
Their Pop Tab Collection program is a response to pull-tab mania, and although its web site presence perpetuates the myth that the tabs are made of a purer form of aluminum than the rest of the can (they’re not), … - Snopes
The beverage cans are made of two aluminum alloys (3004 for the main body, and 5182 for the lids) having different compositions. The 3004 alloy has the exceptional formability needed to perform the deep drawing process; the 5182 alloy is harder and permits the pull-tops to function properly. When the cans are remelted, the resulting alloy contains both Mg and Mn and is not suitable for with either application.
One approach to recycling the cans is to separate the two alloys from the cans. The cans are shredded, then heated to remove the lacquer that helps protect the cans during use. We could then further shred the material at a temperature where the 5182 alloy begins to melt. The 5182 alloy has a wider freezing range than the 3004 alloy and breaks into very small pieces; the more ductile 3004 alloy remains in larger pieces. The small pieces of 5182 can therefore be separated by passing the material through a screen. The two separated alloys can then be melted, cast, and rolled into new can stock.
An alternative method would be to simply remelt the cans. Once the cans have been melted, we could bubble chlorine gas through the liquid alloy. The chlorine reacts selectively with the magnesium, removing it as a chloride. The remaining liquid can then be adjusted to the proper composition and be recycled as 3004 alloy.
Fair enough - I imagine it doesn’t make a big enough difference in terms of recyclability anyway - especially when the tab is a fraction of the weight of the can
