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As an Oregonian, I think the biggest contributor is definitely bumping the redemption value from 5 cents to 10 cents. At that price, it makes it economically vi

As an Oregonian, I think the biggest contributor is definitely bumping the redemption value from 5 cents to 10 cents. At that price, it makes it economically viable for the homeless population to spend lots of time going around and gathering every available bottle. In my neighborhood, I even have homeless people digging through my recycling bins every few hours rummaging for bottles to cash in!

meritt 8y ago
As a kid, I earned a considerable amount of money (sometimes $5+ per day) riding my bike around and collecting cans and bottles during the summer. Those bought me a lot of MTG cards and layaway payments on the latest SNES game. Now I just set them alongside the recycling bin for the homeless as well. I feel like the neighborhood kids are really missing out on a lucrative opportunity.
- matthoiland 8y ago
  You make look silly with two giant garbage bags hanging off your bike, but at the end of the day who's holding on to 20 bucks? It felt like a fortune back then, and was an honest hard days work.
  - freehunter 8y ago
    >It felt like a fortune back then That's the biggest problem for me. It was a fortune back then. My family would collect bottles all year and cash them in for a vacation. But back then it was 10c per bottle... 30 years ago. Today, it's still 10c per bottle. With inflation, that's more like 5c per bottle. Couple that with the rise in bottled water and other non-carbonated drinks that don't have deposit on them plus a lot of store brands and specialty bottles that require you to go to multiple stores to return, a whole day of collecting bottles might only net you $5. And then you have to spend another day going back and forth between Family Fare, Kroger, Meijer, Walmart, Target, and maybe even a specialty bottle store. Even for kids, a lot of times it's not worth it for just a few bucks.
  - megy 8y ago
    With cans, you could crush them, so they took up only a small amount of room.
- Symbiote 8y ago
  In Copenhagen, many of the public litter bins have a small shelf for donating bottles. I will hold on to a bottle for longer to put it on one of these shelves, rather than in (or beside) the bin. Picture: https://media.mnn.com/assets/images/2015/07/KBHPant-Copenhagen.jpg.653x0_q80_crop-smart.jpg https://media.mnn.com/assets/images/2015/07/KBHPant-Copenhag... ("pant" is cognate with "pawn".)
martinald 8y ago
Is this actually a good thing? In Germany (esp Berlin) homeless people do this a lot, but I've seen them basically empty a whole trash container on the street to get a few bottles. While it's great there is a revenue source for the homeless; I can't help thinking that it's not a great way to do it. Must cost a fortune to clean up the trash after people have been through them, way more than the few (euro)cents you get back...
- blacksmith_tb 8y ago
  The simple solution is to design recycling carts with some kind of for-deposit-item hopper. Here in Portland I just set mine next to the can, since there's no chance they'll go unclaimed.
- ghostly_s 8y ago
  When I was in Berlin recently it seemed ubiquitous to set redeemable bottles aside for the homeless to collect, or just hand them to homeless people directly. Seemed like only the tourists were throwing them in the trash. Not to say dumping bins doesn't happen but certaintly didn't seem like a widespread problem -- and how exactly does it cost "a fortune" to clean up a pile of trash in the street? Street cleaners are already on payroll.
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 8y ago
    In Sweden it works the same. When you are walking down the street and finish your drink, it's common courtesy to not throw it in the trash can, but instead just leave it on the ground right next to the trash can for someone to collect. They've also basically completely mitigated the fraud aspect of this by having all machines in all grocery stores scan the UPC on the bottle to determine whether it is manufactured in Sweden. The deposit is pretty significant there too, 1 SEK, which is equivalent to about 10 cents right now.
- makeiteasy 8y ago
  In Los Angeles, most people put them into a separate bag in their recycling bins. Then the homeless and scavengers come by and just take a single bag out of the bin without causing too much other trouble. They will occasionally dump a bin to get something at the bottom, but it's pretty rare in my experience.
Taylor_OD 8y ago
I grew up in Vermont where there was/is a 5 cent deposit on cans and a 10 or 15 cent deposit on larger bottles or liquor bottles. I did dozens of, "bottle drives" where we'd go around and ask houses if we could take their cans to raise money. If we spent a few hours doing it we'd get a couple hundred dollars easily. But damn I've never smelt anything worse than a blue massive trash barrel filled with beers cans that are all a year or older. Worth about $20 on it's own though.
ttehstone 8y ago
I think it can eventually have some unintended consequences though. A few years back I visited Calgary and saw signs in parking lots warning people not to leave bottles in their car due to the risk of people breaking car windows just to steal bottles for their redemption value. Alberta has a 10 cent deposit for cans and bottles under 1L and 25 cent deposit for bottles over 1L. Hard to believe people would smash car windows for a couple of dollars.
- mr_tristan 8y ago
  At least in Portland, the window smashers are very like homeless addicts. Many stories abound of people having their window smashed in, coins looted out of the glove box, but things like $400 pair of sunglasses just left to hang out on the dashboard. One of the most frequent posts on Nextdoor here are cars getting looted in front of their houses. (We have lots of homeless scrounging for change.)
vinay427 8y ago
Michigan (see link) seems to further validate that theory. https://fox61.com/2018/05/17/connecticut-trails-other-states-in-bottle-redemption-rates/ https://fox61.com/2018/05/17/connecticut-trails-other-states...
closeparen 8y ago
Why is it okay to pay less than minimum wage and deny benefits to what are essentially misclassified sanitation workers?
- traek 8y ago
  They’re definitely not sanitation workers. On my street the homeless constantly empty full public trash bins all over the sidewalk looking for bottles and cans.
- Dylan16807 8y ago
  Taking bottles out of recycling bins is not doing useful labor.
  - freehunter 8y ago
    And no one asked them to or hired them to do the work. It's like calling someone a street sweeper because they picked up a dime off the sidewalk. Sure it's money in their pocket but it's not exactly a job.
lqet 8y ago
When I was in 5th grade, I spend all of the breaks collecting milk- and lemonade bottles sold by our school cafeteria. If I recall correctly, they had a redemption value of 25 Pfennig (0.25 Deutsche Mark, roughly 0.12 EUR). I stored them in my locker and returned them at the end of the week. I was able to make around 20 DM (10 EUR) per week, or 80 DM per month, sometimes over 100 DM, which was a monstrous amount of money for 10 years old me. There were a few kids doing this, so you had to be quick and know the locations where many bottles were to be found. The best spots were usually the places where the teenage "cool" kids who considered returning bottles below their dignity were hanging out, and you had to be brave enough to approach them. To this day, I remember the pure joy of finding a motherload of bottles, maybe up to 10 at once, and always leave bottles on the top of garbage cans in the city for the homeless :)
throw_away2 8y ago
When I visited friends at the University of Michigan in the early 00s, they would purposely leave their doors unlocked on the weekends and let the homeless come through and pick up after their parties with the tacit agreement that if anything of value went missing, the doors would be then locked. win-win
tdeck 8y ago
This happens a lot in SF too. I'm not sure if it actually does anything to promote recycling since the bottles were already in a recycle bin to begin with.
jnellis 8y ago
This is exactly the scenario in Los Angeles. There is a collective army of bottle and can collectors pulling them from recycle bins and everywhere else. Bins are scoured a dozen times a day; you won't find lone can on the street anywhere.
- mmmeff 8y ago
  Don't forget the part where the homeless walk down Dockweiler beach every morning and dump the garbage cans onto the sand to more easily pick through the trash to get at the cans. What a lovely system we've created.
RosanaAnaDana 8y ago
Another Oregonian checking in. I wonder if there is any correlation between rates of homelessness and redemption rate; my biased impression is that homelessness in general has only increased with my time here, as well as the rate at which I see (almost exclusively) homeless or very low income individuals recycling. I personally will not be bothered redeeming in Oregon, since all cans and bottles have to be manually fed into the reading machine. Coming from California where I can just bring a trashcan full of cans in and get my money, I find the system a complete waste of time. I separate out my recyclables for the canners and leave them out for whomever wants to put in the effort of standing in front of the coop for an hour.
- mdorazio 8y ago
  It's not your imagination. Oregon's homeless population has been increasing several percentage points year over year [1]. It's even worse in California. [1] https://www.oregon.gov/ohcs/ISD/RA/2017-Point-in-Time-Estimates-Homelessness-Oregon.pdf https://www.oregon.gov/ohcs/ISD/RA/2017-Point-in-Time-Estima...
torpfactory 8y ago
Oregonian here: We have had cans intended for redemption stolen from our backyard. They just took the whole bin with cans and walked off. I guess there was probably ~$25 of cans it in.

meritt 8y ago

As a kid, I earned a considerable amount of money (sometimes $5+ per day) riding my bike around and collecting cans and bottles during the summer. Those bought me a lot of MTG cards and layaway payments on the latest SNES game. Now I just set them alongside the recycling bin for the homeless as well. I feel like the neighborhood kids are really missing out on a lucrative opportunity.

matthoiland 8y ago
You make look silly with two giant garbage bags hanging off your bike, but at the end of the day who's holding on to 20 bucks? It felt like a fortune back then, and was an honest hard days work.
- freehunter 8y ago
  >It felt like a fortune back then That's the biggest problem for me. It was a fortune back then. My family would collect bottles all year and cash them in for a vacation. But back then it was 10c per bottle... 30 years ago. Today, it's still 10c per bottle. With inflation, that's more like 5c per bottle. Couple that with the rise in bottled water and other non-carbonated drinks that don't have deposit on them plus a lot of store brands and specialty bottles that require you to go to multiple stores to return, a whole day of collecting bottles might only net you $5. And then you have to spend another day going back and forth between Family Fare, Kroger, Meijer, Walmart, Target, and maybe even a specialty bottle store. Even for kids, a lot of times it's not worth it for just a few bucks.
- megy 8y ago
  With cans, you could crush them, so they took up only a small amount of room.
Symbiote 8y ago
In Copenhagen, many of the public litter bins have a small shelf for donating bottles. I will hold on to a bottle for longer to put it on one of these shelves, rather than in (or beside) the bin. Picture: https://media.mnn.com/assets/images/2015/07/KBHPant-Copenhagen.jpg.653x0_q80_crop-smart.jpg https://media.mnn.com/assets/images/2015/07/KBHPant-Copenhag... ("pant" is cognate with "pawn".)

martinald 8y ago

Is this actually a good thing? In Germany (esp Berlin) homeless people do this a lot, but I've seen them basically empty a whole trash container on the street to get a few bottles. While it's great there is a revenue source for the homeless; I can't help thinking that it's not a great way to do it. Must cost a fortune to clean up the trash after people have been through them, way more than the few (euro)cents you get back...

blacksmith_tb 8y ago
The simple solution is to design recycling carts with some kind of for-deposit-item hopper. Here in Portland I just set mine next to the can, since there's no chance they'll go unclaimed.
ghostly_s 8y ago
When I was in Berlin recently it seemed ubiquitous to set redeemable bottles aside for the homeless to collect, or just hand them to homeless people directly. Seemed like only the tourists were throwing them in the trash. Not to say dumping bins doesn't happen but certaintly didn't seem like a widespread problem -- and how exactly does it cost "a fortune" to clean up a pile of trash in the street? Street cleaners are already on payroll.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 8y ago
  In Sweden it works the same. When you are walking down the street and finish your drink, it's common courtesy to not throw it in the trash can, but instead just leave it on the ground right next to the trash can for someone to collect. They've also basically completely mitigated the fraud aspect of this by having all machines in all grocery stores scan the UPC on the bottle to determine whether it is manufactured in Sweden. The deposit is pretty significant there too, 1 SEK, which is equivalent to about 10 cents right now.
makeiteasy 8y ago
In Los Angeles, most people put them into a separate bag in their recycling bins. Then the homeless and scavengers come by and just take a single bag out of the bin without causing too much other trouble. They will occasionally dump a bin to get something at the bottom, but it's pretty rare in my experience.

Taylor_OD 8y ago

I grew up in Vermont where there was/is a 5 cent deposit on cans and a 10 or 15 cent deposit on larger bottles or liquor bottles. I did dozens of, "bottle drives" where we'd go around and ask houses if we could take their cans to raise money. If we spent a few hours doing it we'd get a couple hundred dollars easily. But damn I've never smelt anything worse than a blue massive trash barrel filled with beers cans that are all a year or older. Worth about $20 on it's own though.

ttehstone 8y ago

I think it can eventually have some unintended consequences though. A few years back I visited Calgary and saw signs in parking lots warning people not to leave bottles in their car due to the risk of people breaking car windows just to steal bottles for their redemption value. Alberta has a 10 cent deposit for cans and bottles under 1L and 25 cent deposit for bottles over 1L. Hard to believe people would smash car windows for a couple of dollars.

mr_tristan 8y ago
At least in Portland, the window smashers are very like homeless addicts. Many stories abound of people having their window smashed in, coins looted out of the glove box, but things like $400 pair of sunglasses just left to hang out on the dashboard. One of the most frequent posts on Nextdoor here are cars getting looted in front of their houses. (We have lots of homeless scrounging for change.)

vinay427 8y ago

Michigan (see link) seems to further validate that theory. https://fox61.com/2018/05/17/connecticut-trails-other-states-in-bottle-redemption-rates/ https://fox61.com/2018/05/17/connecticut-trails-other-states...

closeparen 8y ago

Why is it okay to pay less than minimum wage and deny benefits to what are essentially misclassified sanitation workers?

traek 8y ago
They’re definitely not sanitation workers. On my street the homeless constantly empty full public trash bins all over the sidewalk looking for bottles and cans.
Dylan16807 8y ago
Taking bottles out of recycling bins is not doing useful labor.
- freehunter 8y ago
  And no one asked them to or hired them to do the work. It's like calling someone a street sweeper because they picked up a dime off the sidewalk. Sure it's money in their pocket but it's not exactly a job.

lqet 8y ago

When I was in 5th grade, I spend all of the breaks collecting milk- and lemonade bottles sold by our school cafeteria. If I recall correctly, they had a redemption value of 25 Pfennig (0.25 Deutsche Mark, roughly 0.12 EUR). I stored them in my locker and returned them at the end of the week. I was able to make around 20 DM (10 EUR) per week, or 80 DM per month, sometimes over 100 DM, which was a monstrous amount of money for 10 years old me. There were a few kids doing this, so you had to be quick and know the locations where many bottles were to be found. The best spots were usually the places where the teenage "cool" kids who considered returning bottles below their dignity were hanging out, and you had to be brave enough to approach them. To this day, I remember the pure joy of finding a motherload of bottles, maybe up to 10 at once, and always leave bottles on the top of garbage cans in the city for the homeless :)

throw_away2 8y ago

When I visited friends at the University of Michigan in the early 00s, they would purposely leave their doors unlocked on the weekends and let the homeless come through and pick up after their parties with the tacit agreement that if anything of value went missing, the doors would be then locked. win-win

tdeck 8y ago

This happens a lot in SF too. I'm not sure if it actually does anything to promote recycling since the bottles were already in a recycle bin to begin with.

jnellis 8y ago

This is exactly the scenario in Los Angeles. There is a collective army of bottle and can collectors pulling them from recycle bins and everywhere else. Bins are scoured a dozen times a day; you won't find lone can on the street anywhere.

mmmeff 8y ago
Don't forget the part where the homeless walk down Dockweiler beach every morning and dump the garbage cans onto the sand to more easily pick through the trash to get at the cans. What a lovely system we've created.

RosanaAnaDana 8y ago

Another Oregonian checking in. I wonder if there is any correlation between rates of homelessness and redemption rate; my biased impression is that homelessness in general has only increased with my time here, as well as the rate at which I see (almost exclusively) homeless or very low income individuals recycling. I personally will not be bothered redeeming in Oregon, since all cans and bottles have to be manually fed into the reading machine. Coming from California where I can just bring a trashcan full of cans in and get my money, I find the system a complete waste of time. I separate out my recyclables for the canners and leave them out for whomever wants to put in the effort of standing in front of the coop for an hour.

mdorazio 8y ago
It's not your imagination. Oregon's homeless population has been increasing several percentage points year over year [1]. It's even worse in California. [1] https://www.oregon.gov/ohcs/ISD/RA/2017-Point-in-Time-Estimates-Homelessness-Oregon.pdf https://www.oregon.gov/ohcs/ISD/RA/2017-Point-in-Time-Estima...

torpfactory 8y ago

Oregonian here: We have had cans intended for redemption stolen from our backyard. They just took the whole bin with cans and walked off. I guess there was probably ~$25 of cans it in.