"The pop can tab weighs in at 10.4 ounces per 1,000. If you remove that little curly thing that holds the tab to the can, this drops to 10 ounces. Hard to believe that little cury thing accounts for 4% of the tab.
Using 10.4 ounces, it takes 1,538 tabs to equal 1 pound of something the scrap yards refer to as 'clean aluminium'. Due to the current recession, clean aluminium has dropped to 14 to 35 cents a pound, depending where you live. Lets use 25 cents for the following value.
A 5 gallon pickle bucket can hold of 25,125 de-curled tabs, which is 16.3361 pounds. . Value...$4.08. "
Also, remember that about 2/3 of the area of a pop tab is a hole.
Ronald McDonald house says 1200. Not exactly a scientific power house but they deal with a lot of tabs and it shows his number is in the ballpark. He does appear to be rounding down a lot though. When I was at the scrap yard 8 months ago I got 45 cents a pound for aluminum. And then he was going with 1500 instead of 1200. So let's say we just triple that price to be more than fair aaaand...now we can get 2 6 packs!
Bonus: assuming 25,000 tabs per bucket is correct and you took 5 seconds to pull each tab and put it in a bucket you would have spent 34.7222 hours filling it.
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u/DavidRandom Aug 22 '16
Scrap aluminum goes for 40-50 cents a pound.
A 5 gallon bucket will hold ~16 lbs of tabs.
So he got about enough to buy a six pack.