Candy-cane-striped is just one of the many colour schemes for Maljohn Plastics’ toboggans, which are being sold as a holiday fundraiser.

“We really have been making them a long, long time just for friends and people we know,” said Malcolm Johnson, owner of the Binbrook-area company that has manufactured impact- and abrasion-resistant plastics for more than 40 years. “I remember taking my kids to the Hamilton Golf Club … and sliding down the hill.”

The toboggans are made out of recycled plastic — scraps from spouts, chutes, funnels and component parts for conveyors, elevators and other machinery — and are being sold as a holiday fundraiser.

 
“This material, you can literally hit it with a sledgehammer at 70, 80 degrees below zero,” he said. “It won’t break.”

Johnson said they started making the winter toys decades ago as thank-you gifts for customers and suppliers in place of the traditional “bottle of booze.”

“I have customers and friends and suppliers that are using the toboggan 35 years later with their grandchildren,” he said.

But this is the first year the company is selling these “high-end” sleds — $99 for a five-foot toboggan and a four-foot for $83 — with the 100 per cent of the proceeds going to local and Canadian charities, including Ronald McDonald House, Childhood Cancer, the Good Samaritan and Hamilton’s Welcome Inn Community Centre.

The goal is to raise between $50,000 and $100,000.

“It’s a lifeline for us to keep going,” said Jamie VanderBerg, executive director of Welcome Inn.

Like many Hamilton organizations, Welcome Inn has seen the impacts of the pandemic. The organization was forced to move its annual fall fundraiser online, but the response wasn’t the same.

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