By Natalie Bazinet
Staff Writer
CASWELL — When almost 12-year-old Delaney Rossignol became Little Miss Caswell in 2009, she took on a service project as well as her crown; it wasn’t required of the position, but she and her parents felt that it was the right thing to do.
Aroostook Republican photo/Natalie Bazinet
The 100 pounds of pop-tabs collected by Caswell sixth-grader Delaney Rossignol will go a long way as a donation to the Shriners Burn Hospital in Boston, but Delaney found that the roughly 140,000 tabs that make up the 100 pounds are pretty fun to play in.
Roughly a year-and-a-half has passed since she became Caswell’s queen, but all the sparkles on her crown couldn’t hold a candle to the shimmering sea of pop-tabs she’s collected from the Caswell, Limestone and Caribou communities that will all be donated to the Shriners Burn Hospital in Boston. From there, the aluminum tabs will be sorted, weighed and sold with proceeds used to purchase everything at the hospital from X-ray viewing screens to arts and crafts supplies and toys for injured children to play with while they recover.
At 100 pounds of aluminum pull-tabs, her charitable collection could be anywhere between 120,000 and 140,000 tabs strong, though Delaney is pretty certain that it’s right around 140,000.
Delaney liked collecting tabs for the Shriners Hospital “because they’ll help little kids,” she said.
While she adamantly prefers Coke to Pepsi, Delaney didn’t drink 140,000 cans of soda by herself — she doesn’t drink much canned pop at all.
To collect the tabs, Delaney and her family put collection containers at Save a Lot, Shop ‘N Save and Do Do’s in Caribou, Mike’s Family Market in Limestone, Parent’s Country Store and their local redemption center. A couple of individuals helped Delaney along, like Beverly Edgecomb of Limestone who donated just about 15 pounds of pull-tabs to Delaney’s project.
“It was really easy,” she said. “We’d just check the containers whenever we were in the store.”
Now that she’s reached her 100-pound goal, Delaney’s hoping that she might be able to take a trip to Boston to visit the children in the hospital, but she’s pretty busy as a sixth-grader.
Her project helped raise awareness of the program, and there are still plenty of places that individuals can donate their pop-tabs (like the Dawn F. Barnes Elementary School, for starters) because, just like Delaney will tell you, “it’s for a really good cause.”
