Published: August 19, 2008 10:20 pm      

Bottle cap hoax upsets residents, but shows how much folks care

If plastic bottle caps could help cancer victims receive chemotherapy treatments, many southern West Virginia residents would benefit.

Unfortunately, plastic bottle caps don’t do anything more than keep liquids from spilling.

When news broke Monday confirming that collection of such caps to help raise money for cancer patients was a hoax, area stores and businesses did away with collection bins that sometimes held thousands of pop bottle lids.

Shelia Riffe, manager of the Wal-Mart Vision Center in Beckley, said her store began collecting the lids more than two months ago after her minister announced he had heard by phone of a young boy in need of chemotherapy.

“He said if this young boy could get 1,500 lids, then he would get one chemo treatment,” Riffe said.

Many members of that church, Maynor Freewill Baptist in Sweeneysburg, began collecting the lids, and many of them took their willingness to help to their workplaces, where other employees caught on and introduced the project to their churches.

Of course, other area churches may have been participating long before her own, Riffe noted, but additional churches quickly joined in. In a matter of days, lids were pouring in to her collection bin in the Wal-Mart employee lounge — she estimates some 2,500 a week by the second week of collection.

The lids, she said, were being taken to Raleigh General Hospital.

But Kevin McGraw, marketing director at Raleigh General, said the hospital is not and has never been involved in such a program. He did, however, in researching questions asked by The Register-Herald, learn of an individual employee who collected the caps “in significant numbers” — multiple van loads, to be specific — with the belief they would help cancer patients. The employee declined to speak with The Register-Herald but did tell McGraw she never asked anyone for the caps.

“They just started appearing on the loading dock of the hospital,” McGraw said after speaking with the employee. The employee, obviously well-intentioned and aware of the project that has since turned out to be a hoax, took the caps to another individual who was collecting them. Information about where the caps went from there could not be obtained Tuesday, but it appears likely they continued traveling along a chain of individuals saving the lids for someone else.

Wal-Mart and the hospital employee weren’t the only ones trying to help.

A man who answered the phone at Sam’s Club on Eisenhower Drive said the store was the location of a collection receptacle emptied on a regular basis by “an older gentleman” who easily filled giant trash bags with the caps.

“We got thousands and thousands of them,” he said, adding that the man visited the store Tuesday morning and expressed to pharmacists he was upset to learn of the hoax. Sam’s has stopped collecting the caps.

At CVS on Harper Road, a representative in the pharmacy said CVS had been collecting the caps for a local church that would periodically send someone to pick up the caps. No one working in the pharmacy Tuesday knew the name of the church. That store also ceased its collection Tuesday morning after reading the news.

Amy Berner of the West Virginia chapter of the American Cancer Society was quoted in newspapers throughout the state Monday saying her agency is trying to discover how the hoax started.

The question remains, however, as to where these thousands of bottle caps were ultimately being taken or sent.

Sherrie Hunter of the Raleigh County Solid Waste Authority said the caps are the wrong form of plastic to be recycled. They are not collected at her center.

“They have no value,” she said. “We have heard of a charity which uses bottle caps as a means of earning money; however, we have no idea who it could be. As a recycler, we know it is impossible for a bailer to bail the materials and ship them to the mill for recycling.”

Riffe, from Wal-Mart, said she was disappointed to learn the project was a hoax.

“We were all gung-ho,” she said, “but I am so proud of Wal-Mart. The first week that we collected them, we may have taken 200 to 300 down. Since then, it’s been just overflowing. To think that these people would really pull together and do something like that was wonderful.”

Riffe also said she hated to see the lids go to waste. She suggested finding ways to use them in craft projects.

— E-mail:

bnaudrey@register-herald.com