Rick’s Rants and Raves

A couple of years ago, while visiting a facility for work, I came across a “Pop-tops for Charity” donation bucket. I don’t recall the particular details, but it was pretty vague… “Put your pop-tops here to benefit a local charity”. I read up on the Snopes article, and decided to put a note on the bucket before I left with the URL to the Snopes article.

This week, I’m in a training class, and the training coordinator made a plug for their “Pop-tabs for Ronald McDonald House” collection in the break room. I remembered the previous experience, but I didn’t remember that the Snopes article specifically called out Ronald McDonald house:

in 1987 McDonald’s found it a good idea to get into the act. Their Pop Tab Collection program is a response to pull tab mania, and it at least provides folks with a place to dump the tabs they’ve been hoarding over the years

I even found a page on the Atlanta Ronald McDonald House website where they seem to promote the idea. I was shocked! This seemed to be a legit way to raise money for a charity!
In fact, it is legitimate, but is it worth while? According to the Atlanta RMH, in 2008 they recycled 13,647 pounds of tabs, and received $8,188 for the effort. That’s about $0.60 per pound. How many pop-tops does it take to make a pound? Their own website tells us: 1280. So, each pop-top has a cash value of $0.60 / 1280 = $0.0005. Put another way, twenty pop-tops are worth a penny.

Part of me mocks this–people honestly feel like they are doing some good for the charity by putting their pop-top in a bucket. But they would do WAY MORE good by dropping a single penny in the bucket.  Why not call it ‘Pennies for Patients’? Most people view pennies as just as worthless as pop-tops. How often do you see someone bend over to pick up a penny in the street? But the difference is like the difference between feeding a homeless person a meal, and feeding him for the whole week.

Another part of me can view this as “micro-donations”, that, for RMH, is essentially free money. Volunteers gather the pop-tabs, take them to the houses, where they are then delivered to recycling centers. The resulting check is then popped into RMH accounts. But is it even worth the volunteer time (not to mention all the individual pop-top contributors) to handle the recycling? If the average volunteer manages to collect one 9 pound bucket per year, and deliver it to a house, that’s $3.60 for their efforts. Getting to one of the houses in Atlanta could cost that much in automotive wear and tear, gas, parking, etc. If another volunteer delivers 100 pounds to the recycling center at a time, that’s $60 for a couple hours of work, more gas, wear, tear, etc. Yes, again its all “free” volunteer time, but why not have volunteers go dumpster diving to retrieve whole aluminum cans? Why not have volunteers scour the streets for dropped pennies? Again, I guess it is the micro-efforts of a lot of people that, in aggregate, have some very small, but measurable benefit.

I’m actually surprised RMH even cares to promote it–according to their Form 990, they got $3.5 Million in direct public support in 2008. The recycling program was 0.2% of that total. Can you say “waste of volunteer time?”

On this bucket I think I’ll put a note “Cash Value of each pop-top: 1/20th of a cent. Thanks for your support.” My guess is that the irony would be lost on most.