Oh, I’m sure the penalties will be quite severe. But what’s the point of being a rebel if you let that worry you?
So, at your place of work, it’s a genuine concern that HR could – at least possibly, because you don’t know how serious they are – enforce penalties for not contributing to some random co-worker’s personal choice of charity?
Where do you work?
I see the pull tab drives as a variation on the “add an egg to the cake mix” story (which may or may not be UL too).
The idea being that by inventing some make-work for people to engage in, e.g. collecting 1200 tabs, the charity causes the people to feel more invested in the charity than if instead they just dropped 50 cents in the contribution jar on the way out to lunch one day.
If they can convince you to think of e.g. Ronald McDonald house every time you finish a can of soda, that’s a lot more mind-share for them than if you just drop that quarter or two in the jar once. For a single person who drinks one can a day it’ll take 3 years to collect that many tabs. At 3 cans a day, it’s still a year.
As to charities and HR …
Lots of bigger companies get really rah-rah and downright coercive about this stuff. Or at least used to.
The annual United Way drives were infamous, with management all up and down the chain being graded on the participation percentage of their subordinates. Once United Way was pretty well exposed as mostly a great way for their executives to get rich, a lot of the corporate fervor for UW drives died out.
In smaller workgroups, a lot of peer pressure can get applied if one of the cheerleader personalities makes it their (usually “her”) mission to ensure everyone is participating. Being shunned by your office mates over fractions of a dollar is stupid. But humans are stupid.
Somewhere a troll/scammer is laughing his ass off whenever this stupid story emerges again. It’s right up there with the “Bill Gates will give you $100 if you email him right now.”
As P.T. Barnum (or is it Bridgeport?) once said (supposedly), “A sucker is born…”
I save plastic and glass bottles. I also save some metal things, like the pans that pies come in at the grocery store and aluminum cans. I wash them off and save them in bags separate from the rest of the garbage. I save the lids to those things too, which are plastic or metal. Every few weeks I put those bags into my car and drive less than half a mile to the recycling dumpster that’s nearest. If anything I ever buy had poptops, I would throw them into those bags too, but I’ve never seen any poptops that came off of aluminum cans for many years. I have no idea how and how much of the things in those bags thrown into the recycling dumpster are recycled. I do my best to make the drive to the recycling dumpster part of a drive I have to make that day anyway so I’m not wasting gas.
It is doing something useless with a pretense of helping others.
And where if you dont participate, you will be looked down upon.
I don’t consume anything that comes with pop tops. Well, maybe one or two items per year, but it’s so infrequent I can’t even remember what it is I’ve used that had a pop top. I’d ask to pay cash in lieu of.
That’s still not a scam though. Or does scam just mean “something I don’t think is useful” to you?
I guess walkathons are somehow scams and everything else short of donating money straight to the needful source?
Walkathons raise a lot more money.
Looks like they disagree
Not that I agree. I just think scam is way too strong a word.
Well, “scam” may not be the right term here, but I cant think of a better one.
Those actually work- not as much as directly donating, sure, but then there’s the social aspect of doing something together.
It’s not a scam if you’re collecting the tabs simply for recycling and value redemption.
Per Cecil (linked above):
You’d save yourself a heap o’ trouble and make a lot more money if you recycled the whole can.
The benefit of collecting just the tabs is that they’re so small and more dense than collecting the entire can. If you collect the entire cans they take up a lot of space. I’ve got a 5 gallon buckets of just the tabs and it is fairly heavy.
If you collect the tabs alone you are still losing money, though, unless you have no assigned value to your time whatsoever.
It only takes a couple of seconds to remove a tab.
I guess you win, so go try to turn in that tab and see what happens. According to this chart Daily Metal Price: Aluminum Price Chart (USD / Pound) for the Last Year aluminum is about $1.18 a lb., so figure out how long it would take to rip off a lbs. worth of tabs and see if that much time is worth $1.18 to you.
Those old pop tops came off automatically. The more recent pop tops stay attached**. But they can be removed with a brief twist.
**IIRC the reason for the change (ca. mid 1970s) was that the ‘ring’ of the old pop tops could be launched with the ‘blade’ like a metal frisbee, creating a purported safety hazard.
You must be young.
The reason for the change was that the top seal of the pull tab was very sharp, and people would just drop them on the ground, littering and causing a foot hazard (see: Jimmy Buffet).
The “stay-attached” top could be ripped off, and then broken in half to create the “launcher.” The design was changed to eliminated the notches that were used to launch that tab.
Well, that, and detached pop-tops were easy to leave behind as litter. (Not that cans, too, aren’t a big source of litter.)
Yes!
I knew it was a hazard, but didn’t remember the foot thing. I do remember my and other kids’ mothers screaming that we’d “put (our) eyes out!”
Is that the reason we stopped opening up our pop cans with an air rifle?