Bottle cap hoax upsets residents

[llewtrah]

It the folks collecting them make arrangements with a recycling centre (or with one of the few legit organisations who already have such arrangements), I say "go for it". It may be labour intensive for a small reward, but it's something children can get involved in and feel good about making even small sums for good causes.

When I was 12, our class did a paper recycling collection. Every week we collected newspapers from our households and our neighbours and took them to our classroom collecting point. When we had enough (usually 8 - 10 weeks), one of the parents brought over their small van for loading the paper and they took it to the recycling centre. The money went to a nominated charity. Each time, we tried to improve the amount we got - picking up discarded papers at the bus station, adding a few more neighbours to the collection round, getting unsaleable damaged magazines from corner shops etc.

I suppose one crucial factor was that we were the "Blue Peter Christmas Appeal generation". For those outside of the UK, every Xmas, Blue Peter had an appeal where they collected something to raise money for charity - one year it was unwanted diecast models for scrap metal, another year it was textiles. At primary school most of us had grown up collecting milk bottle tops to raise money for guide dogs for the blind.

We also sorted comics out from our collection and sold them at a tabletop sale in the school hall for a few pence each (I got a nice collection of 2000AD comics which would now be valuable had I kept them).

Unlike many of the word-of-mouth bottle cap collections, we knew how to dispose of the stuff we collected and each payment we got was logged on a Blue Peter style totaliser throughout the year.

[llewtrah]

A variation on this is the ring pull collections. In Australia, organisations are colecting them in the mistaken belief they are made from titanium and can be melted down for wheelchairs.

Links for anyone interested, or who needs to debunk this as their scout group/school etc

http://www.rotarydownunder.com.au/ma...s/05sep/9.html (foot of page)
http://www2b.abc.net.au/science/k2/s...ic2623991.shtm
http://www.huggies.com.au/forum/topi...an-ring-pulls/

[snopes]

Originally Posted by Richard W

For one thing, some places actually do take plastic bottle caps for recycling for cash - I've seen at least one that does. 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.

But it's still a hoax in the sense that people are collecting the caps in the mistaken belief that they'll provide somebody with wheelchairs or cancer treatment or the like. That the collectors can now actually get some marginal cash value for their caps because so many people have been taken in by the hoax doesn't really make it any less of hoax.

[Gayle]

My friend Scott reuses them:
http://galleries.statesman.com/galle...-041510/#75958

[Richard W]

Originally Posted by snopes

That the collectors can now actually get some marginal cash value for their caps because so many people have been taken in by the hoax doesn't really make it any less of hoax.

True, although I don't think there's a specific claim attached to the caps that my colleague's daughter is collecting. And I agree that it's a complete waste of time in terms of trying to raise money.

The point I was arguing with was really that nobody along the way would have noticed that it was silly. Lots of people do, but it's also not worth the argument. If the only difference is putting a plastic cap in one pot rather than another, and it might get recycled rather than thrown away, and it makes somebody happy (as opposed to humiliating them in some way) then why not?

If there's a good way to suggest to my colleague that her enthusiatic ten-year-old daughter should instead reverse her enthusiasm and tell her teacher that she's wrong (when my colleague is by no means arguing the contrary anyway) then I'd be glad to hear it, although I'm not going to take up the argument either way.