Cochrane seven-year-old turns a million pop tabs into ten wheelchairs
Keaton Foster is seven and lives in Cochrane, Alberta. For more than a year he collected pop tabs through a mailbox outside his home. He reached one million. They are now paying for ten wheelchairs.
17 October 2026
Photo: the Foster family, via CochraneNow
Keaton Foster lives in the Heartland neighbourhood of Cochrane, Alberta. He is seven. He has just handed over one million pop tabs, CochraneNow reported on Tuesday.
He started more than a year ago with a mailbox outside his home. Neighbours dropped their tabs into it. His dad, Nathan, says they came quickly.
The community really rallied to come together and make that happen.Nathan Foster, Keaton’s dad, to CochraneNow
The haul
In mid-August the family drove the whole lot to West Can Recyclers in Calgary. It filled the back of a pickup with totes and water jugs.
Photo: the Foster family, via CochraneNow
The tabs brought in just over $1,000. Keaton’s mum works at Benevity. Its workplace giving programme matched the money in full, so it doubled to just over $2,000.
The family met a couple from the Canadian Wheelchair Foundation by chance. They showed them what the money could do.
Basically, we’re able to build 10 wheelchairs. So we are building five in Canada, and then we’re gonna go down to Mazatlan and build five down there and deliver.Nathan Foster
Mazatlán
The five chairs for Mexico are made in Mazatlán. The workshop there employs 50 people with disabilities. They recycle metal and build each chair to fit the child.
The family plans to fly down in March. Keaton will hand over the five chairs himself.
Just to see him be able to do that, I think is going to hit home for him.Nathan Foster
The next million
Keaton set his next goal before they had left the recycler. His dad had not even put the truck in reverse.
Oh, I can’t wait to do that again. We’ll collect another million tabs.Keaton Foster, as his dad tells it
The Cochrane, Banff and Canmore Legions are helping with the second million. So are Glenbow Elementary School and his new hockey team. The mailbox is still on Belgian Crescent in Heartland.
Carry a story in five words
We run a game called Long Story Short: one real news sentence a day, and you keep the five words that carry it. Today’s is below. Do play.
How to play
One real news sentence. The job is to keep the five words that carry the story and let the rest go, then guess. Blue means the right word in the right place, orange the right word in the wrong place.
Yesterday: Susan Gair, 104, of Glasgow, and her brother William, 86, the last surviving siblings, were reunited after 60 years apart, when William’s daughter found an article about Susan’s 100th birthday. The five were siblings reunited after 60 years.