Dear Professor: What do you think of the enclosed photo and caption from the Ann Arbor News? Where did this boy get the idea of saving pop can tabs? Could it be from an urban legend?
- Margaret Yang, Ann Arbor, Mich.
I've seen dozens of similar newspaper photos. This particular one shows an Eagle Scout dumping a large box of aluminum pull tabs into a bin already half-filled with tabs.
The caption explains that in one year the Scout collected 1,524 pounds of tabs, earning $411.48 after selling them to a recycler. The Scout was donating the money to the Kidney Foundation.
But why hadn't a kid who was smart enough to become an Eagle Scout figured out that if he had simply saved whole aluminum cans he could have earned a lot more money in a much shorter time?
The answer - as Yang suggested - is that the boy was probably inspired by an urban legend, more precisely, by what we folklorists call "redemption rumors."
The clue here is the mention of the Kidney Foundation. For 30 years a rumor has circulated that pop tabs from aluminum drink soda cans can be redeemed for free time on a dialysis machine for kidney patients.
Usually it's claimed that a certain number of tabs equals so many minutes on the life-sustaining machinery and that a needy child in a local hospital is waiting for help. Responding to this emotional story, people around the country have amassed millions of pull tabs, only to learn that they are worth only the price of the recycled aluminum.
In 1988, the National Kidney Foundation joined Reynolds Aluminum Co. in an effort dubbed "Keep Tabs on Your Cans," hoping to persuade people to recycle whole cans and setting up a system to channel the income, at donors' requests, to kidney disease research.
These organizations pointed out that dialysis is covered by insurance or Medicare and that "there is no pull tab/kidney dialysis donation program. It never existed. Anywhere."
The tabs-for-dialysis rumor slowed a little, and many individuals and groups shifted to recycling aluminum to raise money for various medical benefits. But then a strange thing happened. The idea arose that only pull tabs should be saved for the charity recycling programs.
To my knowledge, the first such campaign turning legend into real life began in 1989 in Minneapolis as a fund-raiser for the Ronald McDonald House. That pull-tab appeal was begun by a VFW post, and a flier claims that the program "mushroomed into a nationwide effort involving thousands of individuals, organizations, schools and businesses."
When I inquired why the donors didn't simply recycle whole cans, I was informed that there were "inherent hygiene problems" to this approach and that people enjoyed saving the tiny tabs and mailing them in.
Nobody seemed concerned that pull tabs are designed to remain fastened to cans and that in many instances the cost of postage exceeds the value of a batch of mailed tabs. It would make better sense to recycle the cans and mail in a check.
Recently I've heard of other such authentic, if inefficient, pull-tab recycling campaigns in several Midwestern states. For example, an article in the January issue of Detroit Metropolitan woman reports on the Michigan American Legion's success in collecting pull tabs for recycling to raise money for medical equipment.
The article takes a swipe at "two esteemed college professors" who claimed that saving pull tabs was a "folktale" or "myth." The author urges people to ignore "the professors' erroneous assumption."
I'm one of the professors alluded to, so let me make this perfectly clear. The old tabs-for-dialysis equation is and always was phony. But the new tabs-for-cash equation is genuine, though the sense of it is highly doubtful.
Logically, you'd be much better off keeping tabs on your cans and recycling the whole containers for whatever charity you prefer, and that's no myth. But emotionally, I guess people like the symbolism of "every little bit helps," and they don't mind the extra effort of bending off all those little tabs and ever so slowly seeing them accumulate.