We all know the infamous “pull tab” urban myth. I have looked it up on snopes.com and I am certain that it is largely a myth. But there are a few die-hards here in Canada that INSIST that there they know people who have gained from this (wheelchairs etc). Is there any irrefuteable proof that this is a myth / hoax that I can present to them so my co-workers will stop giving me the evil eye every time I drop a can in the recycle bin with-out taking off the pull tab.
In my search I came across the following : http://www.tabfest.com/
These people ARE joking right???
Pretty hard to prove a negative. The burden of proof is on those who allege this occurred. Tell your co-workers you anxiously await evidence of what they claim–as in real evidence, not hearsay.
The reason there are die-hards in Canada who believe the pull-tab legend is real is because that’s the only place it was real - it’s a case of the urban legend inspiring real life events.
The Royal Canadian Legion in Elora, Ontario, Canada, is the reason behind the truth to this legend. Up until 1993, it really was just an urban legend. They found a scrap dealer (Alcan, in nearby Guelph, apparently) who was willing to take the tabs for the aluminum they contained.
According to an April 17th, 1993 article in the Kitchener/Waterloo Record, the Elora Legion then used the proceeds to purchase wheelchairs for the disabled, just like the UL.
You can read more about it in this article at the alt.folklore.urban archives.
But if they are just buying it as scrap aluminum, why collect just the tab and not the whole can?
Seems they’re missing out on a couple tons of scrap aluminum that way.
If there’s a deposit on the can, you could get it back for the can sans pull tab.
Around here, schools collect them for some reason, and there’s a five cent deposit on cans. Cans are also bulkier and messier that just the pull tabs.
As someone who occasionally does metal detecting, I wish the damned things were never invented. The old ones are really bad, because they were always pulled completely off the can and dropped on the ground by annoying drunks.
What they don’t tell you on any of these sites is that aluminum (pure ingot aluminum) brings in $0.60/lb. At this price, it would take 300,000 tabs to buy ONE wheelchair (the crappiest wheelchair I can find costs $180). Any profit taken by the scrap dealer increases that number.
I also have a hard time believing that tabs are made of “a higher grade aluminum”; soda cans are essentially pure aluminum, and painst and such float off as slag. I can find no reference to any “special aluminum” used in can tabs.
I think that this whole “tabs for wheelchairs” business is a silly attention-getting gimmick; the cans are worth much MUCH more (especially in states with deposits). The wheelchairs are probably donated or sold below cost (perhaps in some kind of matching program).
Maybe the pulltabs are of a thicker guage, since they need a higher structural strength. The tab acts as a lever against the top, which is itself a thicker grade than the sides.
Then Ronald McDonald houses should be ashamed of themselves. From the linked site:
I wonder how much blood, sweat & tears it took to collect 400 million tiny sharp pieces of almost worthless metal. $300,000 sounds like a tremendous achievement, but think about how much money could have been raised if they had collected 400 million pennies instead. It’s simple math, but I’ll give you the answer anyway: Four Million Dollars. More than 13 times what they claim to have collected in pull tabs. Subtract out recycling costs and the labor of who knows how many dozens (hundreds?) of people, and you just have to ask yourself what the hell were they thinking?
Anybody who would prefer to raise $300 for their charity when they could raise $10,000 with much less effort, just isn’t thinking straight. I believe that some McDonalds locations started setting up pull tab bins because they didn’t want the bad PR that could come from turning away charitable donations, even if they were infinitesimally small donations. It would not surprise me to learn that the night shift clean up crews chuck the worthless tabs into the garbage in the wee hours of the morning.
