Collecting Pop Can Tabs

For the past couple months, the wife and I have been saving our pop can tabs, because, well, that's what you do, isn't it?  I remember someone saving their can tabs, maybe Bethany's dad or something?  I don't know, but I knew that it was something that was easy to do and it would benefit someone somehow.  I never really thought about what exactly would happen to those tabs after saving them for a while.

I heard there was something to do with dialysis machines?  Like, they use the tabs to make something for dialysis machines or something?  It was never really clear to me, but just save your tabs, son.  Someone is collecting them to bring to the place where they do dialysis.  Just save them, and give them to people that are collecting them.  Not hard instructions.  

Alright, so a coworker of mine has a collection that is in a constant ongoing thing.  I just pull my tab off and put it a cup, no harm no foul.  But I started thinking about what we do with those tabs at home?  We do nothing with them, so might as well save a used up jar of spaghetti sauce, rinse it out and save our tabs, too.  After all, it's the right thing to do, right?  

So our collection is getting nice and big, about half a jar.  Pretty good for the two of us.  Well I knew that my coworker guy takes them to McDonald's to donate to the Ronald McDonald house.  I thought to myself, there has to be a better place to donate my tabs than to McDonalds.  I looked up where to bring my pull tabs, and that's when I found some sort of shocking information. 

No one collects can tabs for anything other than selling them for scrap. 

 I didn't really think about it before.  I never questioned it.  I just did it, because it really wasn't hard to do.  Apparently, the rumor was that you can donate your tabs to a place that does dialysis, sort of a trade, for a free go on the machine.  I didn't know that was the rumor, but apparently that's what the deal was.  The National Kidney Foundation or whatever has vehemently denied that you can, or ever could do this.  I'm telling you, one quick Google search turns up a whole shitload of results of this myth.  Some even calling it an urban legend.  I can't believe I didn't know this.  

If you do donate tabs to places that you think will accept them, like McDonald's, most of the time they just take them and sell them for scrap and donate the small amount of funds to the Ronald McDonald charity, but it's such a small amount of value, you're way better of just putting your spare change in that little box at the counter when you place your order.  So my collection is just going to get dumped into the aluminum recycling thing when I bring the recycling next time.  Because my collection is nearly worthless.  I guess I could bring them into a McDonald's, but I don't want to look like an idiot that's never heard of this myth, which was actually the truth up until about 8 hours ago.  

Anyway, that's all.  Don't bother pulling off those tabs.  Even that small amount of effort isn't worth anything but a couple bucks.  I think I read somewhere that it would take filling an entire van with tabs to make a hundred bucks.  So yeah, don't bother.