What does 591 pounds of pop tabs look like? For the Lac La Biche Royal Purple, it looked like a generous donation that helped buy specialized medical equipment for local infants.
Kirk Plamondon, a physical education teacher who lives and works in Chandler, Arizona, donated the proceeds from a decade of enlisting his young students to collect the pull-tabs off beverage cans. Plamondon, who has family in the hamlet that shares his last name, decided to donate the $443.25 US raised to the Lac La Biche Royal Purple’s Tabs for Tots charity.
“I’ve got a heart for kids,” Plamondon said. “And I wanted the money that the kids helped raise go to helping other kids.”
A decade’s worth of students in Kyrene Del Cielo and then Chandler Traditional Liberty Campus – the schools where Plamondon taught – managed to collect the massive haul of tabs, enough to completely fill the bed of Plamondon’s Ford Ranger.
“It was something like 200 kids over the years,” Plamondon said. “They really loved it. I had one kiddo whose grandma mailed him an envelope full of tabs. The postage was $1.50 and the tabs she sent were probably only worth a few cents.”
Louise Beatch, secretary for the Lac La Biche Royal Purple, has never met Plamondon before – which made the donation a surprise.
“We just want to say thank you to Kirk – 591 pounds is a lot,” Beatch said. “We’d taken 100 and some pounds before and that was 13 boxes. It takes a lot of tabs to do one pound.”
Indeed, if you consider that a tab weighs 0.3 grams, Plamondon’s students collected around 900,000 of them. Although Beatch doesn’t expect that much from everyone, she said she hopes Plamondon’s exceptional donation will inspire local people to donate to Tabs for Tots. The Royal Purple have been doing the charity for four years now, and have raised over $10,000 for specialized equipment for infants.
“We’re trying to get more people to collect the pop tabs,” she said. “And you can, also donate old pie plates and tin foil.”
Since the group has started the charity, their purchases have included a breast pump, a pulse oximeter, a temporal artery thermometer, and a pediatric blood pressure machine stand. For more information on how to donate to the Royal Purple, call Aleta Mazurek 780-623-4058, Rose Bacon 780-623-7441, or Louise Beatch 780-623-7419.
