Eight-year-old Rigby Wall has a can-do attitude

Spray Air Freshener To reach his goal of collecting 10,000 aluminum cans by the end of the school year, Rigby Wall keeps his eyes peeled to the ground.And sometimes up a tree."One time I found a can in a tree, and there were two inch worms and a spider bigger than a wolf spider in it," said Rigby, a third-grader at Cannons Elementary School. "So I dropped a big rock on it."Under the direction of conservation-minded art teacher Doris Turner, more than 100 students at Cannons have been picking up cans off the roads, from the trash bins and out of the occasional tree in the school's collective quest to make the earth and cleaner and greener place."Ms. Turner encouraged them to clean up the earth," said Susie Wall, Rigby's grandmother and a Cannons recycling volunteer. "Rigby loves to get outside, and he wanted to do what Ms. Turner wants them to do. Last fall, his goal was collecting 2,000 cans. Then it was 5,000. Now it's 10,000."As of mid-April, Rigby was just 1,700 cans shy of that goal, and collectively, the entire school had scooped up more than 25,000 cans.Rigby's efforts have not gone unnoticed by his classmates, either."When I see Rigby picking up cans and bringing them in, I think I can do that, too, and help the earth," said Leah Foster, 9, who's collected about 2,400 cans.As an incentive, students collecting at least 100 cans receive a recycled teddy bear. Turner finds teddy bears at yard sales, flea markets, etc. and cleans them up, sews them up or does whatever needs to be done to make them almost as good as new. Because the Earthcare Project at Cannons has been so successful, she is constantly in need of teddy bears to give her students. (To donate a teddy bear, call Cannons Elementary at 579-8020.) By the way, Rigby has 11 bears. When he reached the 5,000 mark, Rigby won an ice cream party for him and his classmates. He has also been nominated for the Kohl's Outstanding Youth Volunteer Award, which includes a $10,000 scholarship.Can-collecting students who reach the teddy bear level are featured on the in-house TV news program on Thursdays, as well as a special bulletin board recognizing their efforts.The recycled cans have netted the school about $750 this year, and the most of the money goes to maintain the Earth Quilt Garden and to purchase energy-saving light bulbs. The light bulbs are presented to families who, at the beginning of the school year, pledged "to take plastics, paper and other recyclables to the Recycle Center."Turner has expanded the Earthcare Project to include the collection of plastic bottles, and the school has collected more than 7,000 of them. Rigby has brought in about 2,200 bottles. This is a good time of year to find empty soda bottles strewn among the bleachers at local little league games, Rigby said.Both Rigby and Leah collect the tabs off the cans they collect. Susie Wall figures he's collected about 25 pounds of tabs, which were taken to a local kidney dialysis office and now to the local Ronald McDonald House.And both of them enlist the help of family and friends to increase their tallies."Rigby's got everyone in the family involved. People from church bring him bags of cans on Sundays," Susie Wall said. "There's not a day that goes by that he's not collecting cans."Besides avoiding the critters that sometimes take up residence in the discarded cans, picking up cans can be a dirty job. But Leah has one trick to make it more pleasant."When we find beer cans, we spray air freshener on them," she said. Buzz up!