Community

Women of the Moose, Home Depot collect caps for needy children

Moose members (Credit: Paul Squire)
Moose members (from left) Gloria and George Yaede and Peter Faith, along with Home Depot supervisor Terri Hodgson, load boxes of caps Wednesday morning. (Credit: Paul Squire)

The 11 cardboard boxes were filled to the brim with plastic caps from toothpaste containers and plastic bottles and sodas.

“We’ve been collecting them for just over a year,” said a beaming Gloria Yaede, a member of the Women of the Moose in Riverhead. 

Members of the Riverhead Moose Lodge loaded the boxes, each weighing 40 pounds, onto the pallet outside the Riverhead Home Depot Wednesday morning so they could be shipped roughly 1,300 miles to Lake Worth, Fla.

There, the thousands of plastic caps will be recycled and exchanged for cash, which a nearby charity will use to pay for wheelchairs and prosthetics for disabled children.

Ms. Yaede and others from the lodge said this year is the first time the Moose members have collaborated with Caps of Love, the Florida-based charity. The Moose lodge managed to collect the caps, but had no way to ship them, Ms. Yaede said.

That’s where Home Depot stepped in. A Moose member who works at Home Depot arranged to have the store ship the 440 pounds of caps to a Home Depot location near the charity. Moose members said they’ll likely continue to donate next year, and some have already started saving up for next year.

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