The aluminum tab atop a single can of Coke is worth .035 cents.

Yes, that's right: if you drank one can a day, in roughly three months you could earn 3.5 cents from your pop tabs.

Makes you want to turn it into a two-can-a-day habit, right?

Yet Georgia 4-H'ers collect those tiny, nearly worthless pop tabs all year.

In fact, we tell youth they can fulfill their pledge to use their "hands for larger service" and make a difference in Georgia by collecting a single aluminum tab.

Some youth will collect a mere handful of tabs. Others will turn in stuffed gallon bags, making one hope the student didn't drink that much cola alone.

In classrooms across Newton County, individual collections will combine to fill a few bags, maybe a jar or two, or even a copy paper box.

As my co-worker and I travel to each 4-H club in October, we'll load up the pop tabs and slowly create a mountain of odd shaped, slightly sticky containers in our office.

By the month's end, middle school 4-H'ers will volunteer after school to measure each bag and box of pop tabs, awarding club points for each cup of aluminum.

We collected a very impressive 456 pounds of pop tabs last year, or about 707,712 individual tabs. That's enough pop tabs to stretch a trail from the Covington square to the West Avenue Dairy Queen in Conyers.

It was also enough to win top honors for our 39-county district including the metro areas of Columbus, Macon and Atlanta.

However, at a local recycling value of only $182, it seems like a practically useless act.

We'd make more money collecting entire cans, but after all, we're part of the University of Georgia; I have no desire to attract pesky yellow jackets.

In the same way, picking up a single piece of garbage seems useless.

Pushing one extra shopping cart back to the store seems like a waste in the face of entire herds of the carts spread over a parking lot.

Rosa Parks probably never dreamed taking a single seat on a bus would become such a rallying point for the civil rights movement.

G.C. Adams, superintendant of schools in 1904, may have thought his little "corn contest" would last only a few years and reach only a few hundred boys in rural Newton County.

Sometimes, those acts are simply what they are - a single act of kindness or an isolated incident, but we can never predict when they'll snowball into something much more.

Fifth graders will bring in pop tabs, one by one, and watch as they become a box full of aluminum.

Older 4-H'ers will measure the tabs a cup at a time and hold in their hands the product of what a community can pull together to do.

Then in November, 7th and 8th grade 4-H'ers will deliver our pop tabs and witness the power of 170,000 youth working together for a common goal.

I've heard that Ronald McDonald House representatives underestimated the power of 4-H that first year when they showed up with a single, personal vehicle to collect the donation.

This year, there will be moving trucks awaiting the collection. In 2007 Georgia 4-H'ers collected more than 13,500 pounds - enough to fund more than 800 one-night stays at the Ronald McDonald House.

In addition, that's 100 percent recyclable aluminum staying out of landfills. Based on information from the Aluminum Association and the Ronald McDonald House, our county saved the equivalent of energy generated by 327 gallons of gasoline last year.

So while a single pop tab may seem like a waste of time, 4-H'ers know better.

They know that in a Georgia Ronald McDonald House, at least two people are resting a little bit better each night, all year long, as a child goes through treatment at an area children's hospital - all thanks to a lot of tiny, nearly worthless pop tabs.

If you'd like to add your pop tabs to the collection, send them to any 5th grade classroom in the Newton County school system or Woodlee's Christian School, or drop them off at our office in the Newton County Administrative Building.