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An acquaintance wants me to start saving the aluminum pull tabs from beverage cans. Apparently her local tavern collects these and sends them someplace where they can be redeemed for dialysis treatments for indigent kids. This all sounds pretty hinky to me—in fact, if I didn’t know better, I’d say it was a scam. Is it? —Kidney Punch
Is the pull tabs-for-dialysis wheeze a scam? No. Is it a complete load of utter horseshit? Hey, you said it, not me. Still, we shouldn’t be too hard on this heartwarming, albeit wildly misguided, notion: Unlike most loads of utter horseshit (NFTs, Scientology, Clavicular), this one comes from a place of genuine good intentions—people really are trying, in their credulous way, to help the kids.
Perhaps it’s this core of decency that accounts for the myth’s staying power—it’s been around since at least the 1970s. Moreover, unlike hoary standbys like “Alligators in the Sewer” or “Kentucky Fried Rat,” which are remembered as urban legends but rarely believed today, this one is still being repeated as true 50 years later. Not only that, its particulars are virtually unchanged: It was dialysis in 1978, and it’s still dialysis today.
As fascinating as all that may be, however, the tale itself is strictly an urban legend. The backstory often includes vague implications that the pull tabs have some disproportionate value—they’re made of a special kind of aluminum, maybe, or the beverage companies are making a donation for each tab collected. None of that is true. The only value pull tabs have is their value by weight as aluminum scrap.
If that doesn’t sound like much, it’s because it isn’t. It takes 1,128 pull tabs to make a pound of aluminum worth (on a good day) 50 cents. At the absolute rock-bottom price for a dialysis session—the $273 Medicare base rate—you’d need to collect 618,000 pull tabs to pay for a single day’s treatment. And that’s before the substantial blood, sweat and toil of getting 546 pounds of pull tabs to a redemption center.
So, myth busted? Not exactly—as your friend might point out, people really are collecting pull tabs, so they must be going somewhere. Ronald McDonald House, for one, accepts pull tabs, but not really as a fundraiser. They do it to build engagement with the community, to teach kids about philanthropy and recycling and, most importantly, to let credulous barflies unload all those pull tabs they “collected for dialysis” without having to admit that the whole effort was wasted.
Questions? Send them to dr.know@wweek.com.
