There was also gossip about people who dropped the removable tab into their can (to keep from littering) and then accidentally swallowed the tab, causing a rush to the hospital.
Ironic, really, since drinking enough soda to produce a meaningful number of tabs would give you kidney failure.
I used to do this. Never came close to swallowing the tab, however.
Yeah. Dropping the pop top into the can was considered normal behavior; darn near everyone did it.
A few people did famously get hurt, guzzling the contents and getting the tab in the bargain. I’ve had the tab, usually the sharp end, start to come out of the can but I felt it with tongue or lips in time to stop drinking before it got all the way out of the can.
I’m gonna bet the vast majority of actual injuries were to beer drinkers on somewhere between the WAG 6th and 24th can of the afternoon. 
The old-style pop-tops are getting harder to find on eBay. People used to make ‘beaded’ curtains and chain mail out of them.
I heard it too; I can completely believe that there might have been some case where manufacturers of cans might need, for example, to choose a more ductile alloy for the punched/drawn body of the can than for the lid and pull tab, but the notion that this would be consistent across all manufacturers is way too big of a stretch.
Also, ‘the pull tab is worth more than the rest of the can’ is the same as ‘the pull tab costs more to make than the rest of the can’ - and this is a situation any manufacturer would seek to optimise out of existence.
That’s not necessarily a safe assumption. While there might possibly be more material in the pull tab than the rest of the can, the material and manufacturing process of the rest of the can, including painting the logo of the contents, might cost more than the material and manufacturing process of the pull tab. I’m not saying that it does cost more, only that it might cost more.
There’s not more material in the pull tab - there’s (supposedly) more value.
Certainly there might be other processes that cost money, but the implication here is that the metal comprising the tab (which weighs a quarter of a gramme) is worth more than the metal comprising the can (which weighs 15g). The tab is supposedly worth 60x the can, per unit scrap weight, because it’s some special alloy.
That differential in scrap value would be reflected in the purchase cost of new materials in those alloys.
Someone at the manufacturing plant would be saying “surely there’s a cheaper alloy we can use for the tab”, over and over again, until they changed it.
That’s not the entire benefit - there’s also the fact that if I donate only the tabs I can still get my deposit back on the cans. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I never heard of collecting pull-tabs before bottle/can deposits started. ( Before that, I did hear of collecting the entire can and selling them for scrap value, just like you could do for newspapers)
That depends on whose time we are talking about - collecting the tabs from cans you or someone in your proximity has used is not the same as collecting pull tabs from cans you find in the trash for a for a charity. My cousin used to save pull tabs for a Shriner we saw yearly on a vacation. It really didn’t take my cousin any time to save the tabs- when she opened a can of soda she dropped the tab into a receptacle. The Shriner ( who worked at a resort) accepted the tabs while he was at work and he turned them in to the group at a regular meeting so no one was traveling just to pick them up or drop them off. Somebody eventually will have to take them to the salvage center, and that will take time , but he’s not dropping off a pound at a time and he’s a volunteer. Which means that any time he spends volunteering can be seen as losing money/time without an assigned monetary value , whether he’s transporting pull tabs or many the concession stand at the Little League game.
Maybe? But mainly they’re apparently made with an alloy of aluminum and magnesium to help withstand the extra force involved in popping the can open. I doubt that makes them worth a whole lot more, though.
Link here (hopefully not paywalled): Toward a Greener Soda Can - The New York Times
Exactly. At work in the break room I put a container with a label on it, and with some pull tabs in it. I got a lot of tabs that way. I also have family members who collect them for me, like my mom, and every time I see her she hands me a small plastic bag with a few dozen tabs.
Approximately how many tabs to a pound?
I was able to access the article. Thanks for that.
One interesting tidbit from it — “Nationally, about 50 percent of aluminum cans are recycled.”
Having a bag to toss in whole cans would bring in a lot more comparatively.
Wait, are you collecting them for yourself or an organized charity? And if so, which charity is doing this? I had the impression that it was a myth that any group wanted the tabs.
And please differentiate between “That is specifically what we are looking for” and “Since it is aluminum, I guess we’ll take it”.
It certainly would, but that takes up lots more room. Additionally, the cans likely wouldn’t be all cleaned, so the bags would likely be sticky. No thanks, not for me. I’ll collect the pull tabs.
In some states, like Oregon, there are can distribution centers all over that take bags of cans at a time, and you don’t need to wash them out.
I’m collecting them for my church youth group. They’re not running a drive to collect them, but they sure can use the money. They don’t even know that I’m doing it. When I have ‘enough’, however many that might be, I’ll redeem them and make the donation.
That’s what I wrote on the label at work — ‘For Church Youth Group Funds,’ something like that. It was a few years ago. I’m retired now.