One of my co-workers is soliciting soda can pull tabs to be donated to our local Ronald McDonald House.
This sounded like urban legendry to me, so I contacted the volunteer coordinator at the RMcD House, and his response includes the following:
“There is a very good reason to collect the tabs from soft drinks (or any other kind) and bring them to the Ronald McDonald House. We have a volunteer who comes every two weeks and takes the tabs to the recycler for us, which helps pay half our electric for the year.”
I don’t want to sound overly dubious, but just how many soda can tabs would you have to recycle to pay half a decent-sized annual electric bill? Is there a precious metal involved, with which I am not familiar? Do the benefits of charitable donation outweigh the risk of traumatic injury from wrenching those tabs off the cans? :dubious:
Shit. Hit submit too soon. I just printed this article out a couple of weeks ago and pinned it up next to the little plastic box in the break room where people have been putting pull tabs. No one cares.
Next time put up a sign that says “Don’t be a cheapskate. Donate the whole can!!!” And add some text to the effect that these pull tabs are simply being sent to the recycler, so the more aluminum you donate, the better.
I did the math on this a long time ago but can’t recall what numbers I came up with. Luckily, Snopes has it:
So one penny = 33 pull tabs. If you can find the person who collects the tabs every month, ask him or her how many tabs were in the last batch that s/he took over to the RMcD House. For every 1000 they claim to have donated, tell them they just went to all that effort and spent a dollar or two in gas money to make a 30¢ donation to charity.
Where I work they have actual Ronald McDonald House collectors. I mean a little box in the breakrooms that’s decorated to look like a little house with Ronald McDonald and pictures of pop can tabs. It has all the copywrite fine print and stuff, so it looks like The Ronald McDonald House is actively soliciting just the pull tabs, not the whole can.
I suppose if you filled a bag with just pull tabs rather than the entire can, you get more actual aluminium to recycle. A can has a lot of empty space, even when crushed. Most offices recylce cans, so maybe Ronald McDonald House figures the cans can go to the office and they take the pull tabs.
The one I remember most vividly was about 10 years ago and it was someone collecting pull tabs for their sons dialasis (sp) machine. According to them, for each pull tab collected, they would run the machine for one minute longer. In the end, she had collectes somewhere in the 10,000 range (and spent the better part of several months getting them), and was ready and eager to turn them in. Only to find out that all her hard work was for not and there was no one running such a charitable deal, it had all been some hoax that someone had thought up to add another burden to someone already dealing with too much stress. I had done quite a bit of collecting and sorting and counting to help her out and was equally dissappointed to find out it was a hoax. I have never donated another pull tab to any “charitable” causes since. Some people just want something to spread around sometimes and get a little attention.
I never did have the heart to tell her that her months of hard work was going to get her around 7 days if it had been true.
I question how much fun you actually experience collecting pull tabs (it’s got to be several orders of magnitude below stamp collecting), but to each his own.
Allmost 30 years ago there was a Blue Peter appeal for Aluminium can pull rings. The reason for just the rings was that cans were often supposedly made of multiple different metals at the time. Could it be that some 30 odd years ago, the removal of paint/print from a can body plus the sorting out of non-aluminium from aluminium cans made the collecting of the unprinted and definately aluminium pull rings worthwhile?
Look at how many pull tabs they’re collecting. If they got the whole can, they’d have lots of trash bags full of cans, even crushed. They’re a pain to collect and store and transport. Tabs are much easier, and much more sanitary.
Read the links; remember, nobody ever asked for the tabs. It started as an urban legend that sprang full-blown into existence overnight; we don’t really know what started it. McDonalds just bowed down to the will of the masses and announced that yes, they’ll take yer damn tabs. They’ll even put them towards a charity. But no, they don’t have room or the wherewithal to store and transport all those cans.
If they ever put up that kind of tab collection box in my lunchroom, rather than saying “Donate the whole can!”, I’m to say, “Have a glass of water and drop 60 cents into the collection box.”
I’ll put my two tabs’ worth in here: I’ve always been under the impression that it was a holdover from the time when the pull tabs were steel and came off of the can. They were a nuisance and sometimes a hazard ("…stepped on a pop-top/cut my heel/had to cruise on back home…"). There would have been a benefit to getting people to recycle or at least collect those pull-tabs. As for the popularity, well, with minimal effort and inconvenience you get to feel like you’re really helping out.
Except that recycling returnable cans makes sense - you actually get money off of it. When I lived in the dorms, folks would come around collecting returnable cans (10 cents a pop in Michigan, which ain’t bad) for charity. I would usually have several garbage bags full, and I appreciated it just because I wouldn’t have to go to the trouble of returning them myself. Is the pull-tab thing only done in states that don’t have returnable drink cans?
These New Mexico hippies will have near-constant campaigns where sending in the tab from their soda cans will result in a 10 cent donation to breast cancer research, animal shelters, or a list of other good causes. This isn’t because of the salvage value of the tabs through recycing or anything, it’s just a marketing tool to make people feel good about paying $2/can for crappy soda that’s still made out of high fructose corn syrup and isn’t any healthier than a Sprite or Coke.
Could these people just donate 10 cents a can anyway without forcing us to go through the pain in the ass of returning the tab? Sure, but good works done anonmymously don’t really carry the same weight, do they? Also, because only 1 in 10 people will be arsed to actually return the tabs, the fact that the company only sends half of a percent of its revenues to charity is now the consumers fault instead of their fault.
I can provide photos of the cans if anyone needs more proof.
Also, I can assure you that people at my school are gathering up the damn things by the hundreds because I knocked over the jar once on a counter top and had to pick the damn things up for ten minutes. I’m pretty sure that four or five got away so that’s my little day to day act to harm puppies/baby seals/ breast cancer patiets/dialysis patients.
I happen to have 4 gallon milk jugs of them. I melt the bastards down for my sand casting. I collect the tabs because using just the cans for my sand casting is just a mess.
Aluminum cans have very little actual metal to them, what is there has logos and all kinds of impurities. I get more slag out of a can than I do useable metal.Also, your going to have to melt them quick of be willing to store them somewhere you do not mind the smell. Soda cans will stink to high hell when stored. They kind of stink when you melt them too.
In many states there is a nickel deposit on each can. You return the cans to the retailers and get the nickel refunded. (The retailer then sends the cans on to be recycled.) If you donate the whole can to charity, you are out your nickel. If you donate the pull tab, it costs you nothing as you still get your nickel back.
So I vote for “It’s a feel good happy work type thing that is easy for people to do, doesn’t cost them anything, makes them think they are helping, keeps the charity in their mind in case they actually decide to donate any real money, and sends many small trickles of money into charities which help offset some minor costs.”
After all, if schools collect tops for Ronald Mc Donald houses, there are usually dozens of school for every RMcD house. $5/month coming in from each school pays the lights. And while it might make more sense for each donator to just donate their gas money instead of the tabs… people wouldn’t regularly give the $5/month. That’s just the ay people are.