Bottle cap hoax upsets residents

[snopes]

If plastic bottle caps could help cancer victims receive chemotherapy treatments, many southern West Virginia residents would benefit.

Unfortunately, plastic bottle caps don’t do anything more than keep liquids from spilling.

When news broke confirming that collection of such caps to help raise money for cancer patients was a hoax, area stores and businesses did away with collection bins that sometimes held thousands of pop bottle lids.

http://www.register-herald.com/local...232221731.html

[RivkahChaya]

Maybe someone said he was collecting caps, ie, headwear, for chemo patients who lose their hair, and someone else misunderstood....

The one heartening thing in the article was that once people became aware of the hoax, they passed along the information, and the collection buckets were put away.

In regards to where the bottle caps ended up, I can't help remembering something a poster, IIRC, Aimee, once said: no matter what it is, somewhere, it is someone's fetish.

[llewtrah]

American Cancer Society finally debunks bottle caps for chemo hoax.

This email claims that a large number of bottle caps, some say 1,000, others 1,500 or even 10,000, can be redeemed for one chemotherapy treatment for a patient in need. The email, which began making rounds in the USA in 2008, generated several news stories in Virginia and West Virginia, some of which repeated the claims while others refuted them.

Okay, so they missed out the nieghbouring states caught up in the hoax, but hopefully people in those states will exercise common sense. However, the number of emails I've had saying "you just need to know where to send the bottle caps" or the one in (insert name of state here) isn't a hoax suggest collectors caught up in such hoaxes are not renowned for their common sense (or more likely are in denial about being hoaxed or about their contact being hoaxed). I'd heard of car loads of caps being taken to hospital loading bays and the hospitals sending them on to different hospitals or clinics (mostly the ever-increasing number of caps went round and round several hospitals/clinics in a loop).

After extensive research, the American Cancer Society has concluded that the Plastic Bottle Caps for Chemo program is a hoax. The origin of the hoax remains unclear, but it is similar to other “cash for trash” hoaxes that have circulated worldwide for years. One national hair and skin care company has said it will recycle the caps for use in their future products.

[llewtrah]

The bottle top hoax is back here as well!

Fund-raisers collected 26 bin bags of bottle tops over the past 5 months, enlisting the help of businesses, schools and colleges. They believed they were getting wheelchairs for disabled kids. In February one of them was approached by a woman in a local shopping mall who claimed she was collecting bottle tops to pay for wheelchairs on behalf of a Washington school for disabled kids. The woman collected their first 15 bags of bottle tops in June, but since then the collectors have not been able to contact the alleged fund-raiser.

I'm guessing the woman had collected the bags to pass on to someone else and when it turned out to be a hoax she no longer has anyone to pass them onto (and probably has a house full of bottle caps).

[snopes]

Kentucky girl scouts who were tricked into collecting 15,000 bottle caps as part of a hoax say they are thrilled they've found a real use for them.

http://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2008/11/...9861225830698/

[snopes]

Cabin John resident Danny Harris and his wife, Margaret, have an unusual habit – they make a point of collecting pull tabs from discarded cans.

Harris, however, was met with a surprise when he recently called the National Kidney Foundation to inquire where the tabs could be redeemed. A representative there informed him that the tabs could not be traded for dialysis time — that was, in fact, a long-standing rumor.

http://www.gazette.net/stories/01072...19_32473.shtml

I don't know if this is another scam or not, but a guy comes to my GF's office and collects the pull tabs. He says they use the aluminium from them for prosphetic limbs.

Is it really all that different from the aluminium used in the cans? I can't imagine that the hospital/rehab clinic has a smelter out the back or that this guy would have a contract with the manafacturer's of the prosphetic's. It just seems odd.

[llewtrah]

Originally Posted by Altered Statesman

I don't know if this is another scam or not, but a guy comes to my GF's office and collects the pull tabs. He says they use the aluminium from them for prosphetic limbs.

Is it really all that different from the aluminium used in the cans? I can't imagine that the hospital/rehab clinic has a smelter out the back or that this guy would have a contract with the manafacturer's of the prosphetic's. It just seems odd.

There was a "Caps for Charity " collections in Thailand and Singapore between 1999 and 2001. Cerebos, the manufacturer of BRAND'S Essence of Chicken, asked customers to collect the lids from its bottles, so that the aluminium could be recycled into artificial limbs, walking frames and crutches. In 1999 and 2000, BRAND'S, Thailand, campaigned to collect and recycle used aluminium bottle-caps from its products. These were sent to the Prosthesis Foundation which had previously collected aluminium ring-pulls. The BRAND'S campaign was televised and publicised on posters. It collected 2.7 tonnes of aluminium (enough to make parts for 20,000 artificial limbs) and 4 million Thai baht in cash donations. In 2001, collecting points were set up in busy areas of Singapore; the lids were sent to Thailand for recycling. Thailand apparently has a high rate of lost limbs due to moped accidents and to landmines along its border. BRAND'S bottle caps apparently contained a high grade of aluminium suitable for recycling.

Unfortunately that got linked with the various ring-pull collection hoaxes, so the collector really needs to check he isn't being hoaxed. besides, the ring-pulls and the cans are made of the same aluminium and he'd be better collecting the whole can (which makes me think he's been hoaxed).

Thats what I thought. My GF has said the guy seems to be "a bit funny" so I don't know what the deal is. She hasn't mentioned it in a while so he may have stopped for what ever reason.

Thanks for the information about the Thai thing. I have a mate who lost he's leg from a bike accident and they are expensive things. He is a bit of a nutta and engeneer so he has tried to make he's own lolz. We lost contact so I wish I had pics of some of he's attempts.

[hambubba]

In the ancient snopes website I did a writeup of the difference in tabs/cans and the costs.

It's the same aluminum, and the difference is like in the hundreds to one of value. And people are tossing the most valuable part. I called a recycler and asked them about the tabs and cans, and we had a good laugh about it.

[BoKu]

Originally Posted by Altered Statesman

...Is it really all that different from the aluminium used in the cans?...

All aluminum alloys recycle about the same. You melt it all down, scrape the slag off the top and you have fairly pure aluminum. Then you resalt it with zinc or copper or magnesium depending on whether you want 7075 for jet fighters, 2024 for small airplanes or 6061 for trailer frames.

[Eddylizard]

Originally Posted by snopes

Kentucky girl scouts who were tricked into collecting 15,000 bottle caps as part of a hoax say they are thrilled they've found a real use for them.

http://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2008/11/...9861225830698/

Aveda Corp. of Blaine, Minn., operates a bottle cap recycling program to make new metal caps rather than plastic caps for its shampoo and other products, company officials told the newspaper.

This may sound like a dumb question, but how does one recycle old plastic bottle caps into new metal bottle caps? Not that I was ever much good at chemistry.

[snopes]

The bottle cap hoax illustrates a phenomenon that may become more common as trust in old institutions like newspapers erodes and the power of propelling news — true and false — shifts to less formal networks of knowledge like the Internet and e-mail.

http://www.herald-dispatch.com/news/...mors-circulate

[breedle]

In Japan, some schools and other businesses collect the plastic bottle caps to help fund vaccines for children in developing countries. The caps are then reused to make things like pens and chopsticks.

http://ecocap007.com/aboutecocap.html

[fitz1980]

One of my managers fell for something similar at a restaurant in Atlanta, GA. A month or two ago my manager got a call from a woman saying that if we collected bottle caps from the bottled beers that we serve she would come get them from us in a few weeks and based on the number that we kept somebody would donate money to some charitable thing for cancer patients. We never did hear back from her and now I know why.

[RivkahChaya]

Originally Posted by Eddylizard

This may sound like a dumb question, but how does one recycle old plastic bottle caps into new metal bottle caps? Not that I was ever much good at chemistry.

I have a feeling they're talking about metal caps from things like beer bottles. I don't know what they're generally made of, but if they are made of recyclable aluminum, or something else easily recyclable, most people don't think about it, and toss them in the trash, even people who have recycle containers in the house, and will recycle the bottle.

They may be talking about jar caps as well. But yeah, it's not clear.

Originally Posted by breedle

In Japan, some schools and other businesses collect the plastic bottle caps to help fund vaccines for children in developing countries. The caps are then reused to make things like pens and chopsticks.

That looks completely legit, and the vaccine organization really exists. If that's a hoax, it's a good one.

I realize this may be a non-hoax in Japan, where who knows what bottle caps are made from, or how expensive the plastic for less disposable things like pens and chopsticks might be-- Japan is an island, and maybe importing the stuff to manufacture the polymers is much more expensive than it is in the US, so recycling makes more sense. I can't imagine plastic bottle caps being worth anything to a recycler in the US, or the information would be well-known, like the fact that aluminum is worth money.

But I can see people in the US now, reading the article, then collecting caps by the barrell-ful, and trying to mail them to Japan, for more postage than they would be worth to a recycler, even assuming that the plastic in US bottle caps is the same kind used in Japan.

I am certain that if you passed a cup around a group of Americans, asking for postage money to mail bottle caps to Japan to be sold to reyclers, for money to be donated to a vaccine program, you would collect a lot more than if you just passed a cup around asking people to donate money to a program to vaccinate children in Japan.

[snopes]

A lady at church had told Angie and Peyton White about the collection drive: For every 1,000 plastic bottle caps collected from soda bottles, a little girl in Marshall County could receive a free chemotherapy treatment, offered by her doctor.

However, the effort would appear to be a hoax, one that's been circulating in several forms since 2008.

http://www.t-g.com/story/1807910.html

[chillas]

"Cruel?" I'm certainly no fan of hoaxes that prey on emotion and people's desire to help, but honestly this one doesn't even pass the sniff test. Any number of people could have stopped this in its tracks but not a single person asked a critical question. The gullibility of people worries me more than people spreading obvious hoaxes.

[ganzfeld]

Just to comment on the old posts above:

I wonder how the Japanese group relates to the hoax. It seems unlikely that using bottle cap recycling for vaccines is just a coincidence. Maybe someone heard of the hoax and decided "what a great idea!" (It wouldn't be the first time.)

In any case, I don't think the effort is really worth it except that it reminds us whenever we throw away bottle caps that kids need vaccines. Plastic recycling is revving up but I don't think that's because Japan has trouble getting materials for plastics, thus driving up the price. (Plastics are pretty much the same price as anywhere.) As I recall, the drive to recycle plastics came more from the desire to keep them from being incinerated, which produces dioxins. (The rubbish bins are labeled by whether or not the items should be incinerated and plastics go in the "not incinerated" bin.) But, anyway, the caps are not recycled any differently so wouldn't it be better to just say "donate all your plastics for vaccines"? Come to think of it, how about all recyclables? Well, the reason is that, just like the bottle cap case, someone would have to collect all of that and sell it, a job which is already done under municipal contracts. The profit would be minimal. Here's a better idea: How about donating a few dollars to a vaccine group? One vaccine is just a couple hundred yen, or about 4000 caps. Donating a meager one yen per drink (less than 1% of the price) would produce 20 times as many vaccines. Just a thought.

[Richard W]

Originally Posted by chillas

Any number of people could have stopped this in its tracks but not a single person asked a critical question. The gullibility of people worries me more than people spreading obvious hoaxes.

I don't think it's to do with gullibility as such - somebody at work is collecting plastic bottle caps for their 10-year-old daughter at school, and nobody actually believes it (including her), but as she said, her daughter was really enthusiastic about it and she could hardly scoff and tell her the teacher was wrong and refuse to co-operate. For one thing, some places actually do take plastic bottle caps for recycling for cash - I've seen at least one that does (it was actually linked from a page on Llewtrah's site at one point, in an article she'd written). They're doing it in response to so many people thinking you could do it, and the rate is something ludicrous like £20 per half-ton (hundreds of thousands of caps), but it's not a "hoax" as such.

The only person it's any effort for is the person offering to collect them up and take them off to the central location. For everybody else it's just putting the bottle top in a pot rather than the bin, and it's not worth the argument over, especially as the woman at work is doing it to make her daughter happy, rather than any other reason.

(I anticipate the response being that the woman should immediately go into school and start arguing with her daughter's teacher about it, but life doesn't really work like that for most people.)