By W. L. Rathje

I bet that you know what a pop-top or a pull-tab is, but I bet younger kids don’t. In the 1970s and ’80s, the pull-tab pop-top stood out as one of our nation’s most widely recognized icons - one small but potent scrap of aluminum that symbolized America’s unbridled devotion to creativity and convenience. But as I write this commentary, this key part of our garbage past is being buried deeper in the anonymity of our society’s refuse remains.

To record this lost part of the 20th century for posterity, as well as its role in helping the Garbage Project unveil and quantitatively document our midcentury American lifestyles, I will recount the story of Ermal Fraze and his garbage creation - the pop-top - which has now acquired the "legend" status among Garbage Project sorters.

The legend was born on a hot Ohio day in the summer of ’59. Ermal and his family were about to enjoy a luscious picnic when their idyllic outing fell on its face. The beverage cans were chilled, but Ermal had forgotten to bring the one indispensable tool of the day—a "church key" can opener. Faced with a solid steel top, Ermal found only gut-wrenching despair. He was eventually reduced to prying the cans’ lids off on his car’s bumper.

Ermal, however, followed the spirit of his times and set about correcting this huge gaffe in his lifestyle. By 1963 he had patented the pull-tab pop-top that made him a fortune on its way to becoming a short-lived hallmark of American life.

The story picks up again in 1977, when I assigned my sophomore archaeology class to study the detritus left behind at a drive-in theater by moviegoers. While drive-in cleanup crews removed cans, bottles, cups, wrappers, and other visible debris each morning, they invariably left behind much smaller bottle caps and pull-tabs. When we began our study, these neglected throwaways carpeted the whole drive-in.

The class decided to use the nicely labeled bottle caps to determine quantities of soda and beer by brand. We’d collect the pull-tabs to determine the ratio of bottles to cans that people brought with them to drive-ins and assume that the brand distribution among cans was about the same as among bottles.

Each student was assigned a speaker post and tethered to it by a length of rope. Then, on hands and knees, they each picked up and bagged all the bottle caps and pull-tabs they could reach. Every student, that is, except one young woman, who sat against her post and stared at her hands. I quickly walked over to encourage her to take a more active role.

"How’s the surface collection going?" I asked.

"Have you ever looked at these things?" she responded as she held out two pull-tabs in my direction.

"Yeah, fascinating!" I exclaimed as I got down on all fours. "Let’s pick up a few more to look at."

"Why are there so many different kinds?" she asked.

I stopped collecting, sat down, and stared at the pull-tabs in my hands. I held eight, and all were slightly different. The most distinctive pull-tab had two small holes in the base of its pull-ring above the flange that had sealed the can. The second pull-tab was light gold–colored on its top side, but silver on its bottom. It had no grooves in the pull-ring, as many others did, and no holes.

I was shocked! I hadn’t known that there were different shapes and colors of pull-tabs, much less why. Within a few minutes, everyone in the class was sitting and staring down at the tiny artifacts in their hands.

On my way home that day, I stopped at a convenience store to rummage through their beverage coolers. I found that the pull-tabs with two small holes were attached to Coors beer cans and that the ones with light gold fronts and silver backs came from Michelob cans. The different pull-tabs correlated to different brands of beer and soft drinks. Within days, the Garbage Project had constructed a "pull-tab typology" for Tucson, AZ. (You can see it for yourself in the May 1991 National Geographic, page 131.)

The brand-specific pull-tabs, combined with labeled bottle caps, told an interesting story about what people brought with them to drink at drive-ins. Half the tabs/caps were soda and half were beer—no surprise. One result, however, was quite unexpected: The largest number of beer pull-tabs by far was from Michelob cans, one of the more expensive brands. Splurging on a "drive-in night out"?

But what was the typology good for outside of identifying some of the beverage consumption habits at a drive-in? It didn’t take long to determine that just as the final resting place of pull-tabs was widely separated from cans in drive-ins, the same was often the case at home. A few people dropped pull-tabs into their cans, but the vast majority threw them into their garbage separately. This was a classic example of the McKellar Principle in archaeology: Items that are used together are often treated differently as refuse if they are dissimilar in size. The implications were stunning: Even when responsible citizens took their aluminum beverage cans to recycling centers, Garbage Project sorters could still find telltale tabs to indicate what beverages had been purchased. Thus, we could track the rise and fall of beer brands and consumption levels as well as the cola wars within household refuse. (One student has even suggested that, based on a study of the co-occurrence of beverage containers and relatively liberal or more conservative newspapers, Pepsi drinkers tend to be more politically conservative the Coke drinkers, but the jury is still way out on this one!)

But every silver lining has a cloud. The very same separability from cans that made pull-tabs a boon to garbage sorters also made pull-tabs a public enemy. Parents worried that children might swallow them. And just as at drive-ins, pull-tabs began to pile up along the sides of streets and roads, over parking lots, around schools, across parks. In fact, archaeologist Stan South once used the density of pull-tabs to determine the relative popularity of different campsites and trails in parks. So to protect throats and the environment, during the early and mid-1980s, pull-tabs were replaced by push-pull-tops. Sadly for Garbage Project sorters, the push-pull tabs generally remain attached to their cans (except for those drunk by nervous people who play with them until they break and people with moustaches, who often pull off the tabs intentionally).

For sorters of fresh garbage, the glory days of easy brand identification are gone. But for garbage archaeologists, those silent telltale pull-tabs will continue to inform the future about the drinking habits in the latter half of the 20th century, forever retrievable from the insides of landfills.

I believe a toast to Ermal is in order!

Archeologist W.L. Rathje is founder and director of the Garbage Project.

MSW
Nov/Dec, 2000