Is Bottle Bill worth the trouble?
The scene at Northwest 10th and Hoyt suggests it might not be
Oregonians and their Bottle Bill have enjoyed an admirable 52-year marriage, but lately some of the former are thinking of divorce.
The program is now blamed for feeding the city’s unchecked drug market, making public spaces impassable while overburdening mom-and-pop stores. The direct pipeline between an indigent’s bag of redeemable containers and a dose of blue fentanyl pills is a daily drama at Northwest 10th and Hoyt streets, where a RiteAid convenience store must by law pay in cash to a line of desperate recyclers.
“It’s time for the state to revisit the Bottle Bill,” Ken Thrasher said.
Thrasher chairs the Northwest Community Conservancy, a neighborhood-funded program to restore safety and livability in the Pearl District. Thrasher retired as CEO of Fred Meyer Inc. in 2001, and even then thought the processing of bottle deposits a dirty and unhealthy duty better done far from stores.
But what is happening now at RiteAid and across the city is not mere annoyance.
“It’s just perpetrating the drug trade.” he said, noting that fentanyl dealers set up shop near the line at RiteAid and sell pills for $2.50 each to “canners” having just received their payouts.
“It’s a terrible cycle we’re living in,” Thrasher said. “It [the Bottle Bill] was right at the time, but now—because there’s a drug market—they need to reconsider what they’re doing.”
Police calls soar
Marc Abrams, whose condominium overlooks the RiteAid, may be one of the least likely critics of the Bottle Bill’s merits.
“I cut my teeth politically on the bottle bill, working for the sponsor of the bill in the Connecticut senate while in college,” he wrote in an email to state Sen. Elizabeth Steiner last month. “I’m a believer, but the devil is in the details.”
Abrams, a former Portland Public Schools board member and longtime litigator for the Oregon Department of Justice, thought his local elected officials might help.
“Now that Safeway and Fred Meyer ONLY use a BottleDrop system, they have functionally become private clubs,” Abrams wrote. “You have unmanned stations where you need a card to open the chute and drop your bottles, which must be in their green bags with your printed out ID stickers.
“In other words, folks going block by block and collecting from the garbage receptacles or living in transient situations cannot use these,” he wrote.
“So where do they go? They go to a business that sells soda and beer but is too small to do BottleDrop, and is outside a specified radius from the big boys. In the Pearl, they are going to the RiteAid on 10th and Hoyt.
“As a result, the northeast corner of that intersection frequently smells like Bourbon Street in New Orleans at 4 a.m. There is almost always a line of people with massive bags of cans—100 or more—waiting to enter the store, which only lets them in one at a time. Twice now I’ve even seen staff from Central City Concern assisting getting folks there.
“And then, of course, many of them trade the money for drugs and take the drugs right there. Twice in the past month, I have had to break up groups lighting up what I presume is fentanyl right on the corner.
“I have spoken with the manager of the RiteAid. They have no answer. … Their only foolproof option is to stop selling drinks that are under the Bottle Bill, but that’s 15-20 percent of their revenue, so they aren’t going to do that. And the problem continues.”
Abrams is not the only one paying attention to the corner of fate and redemption. Jasmine Sutton of the Portland Police Bureau said there have been 245 calls for police service at Northwest 10th and Hoyt streets so far this year.
“It was not surprising to us that there have been so many calls to service at RiteAid,” Pearl District Neighborhood Association President Stan Penkin wrote in an email to Sutton. “While this location has been problematic for years, it has now been exacerbated 10- or 20-fold since the inception of bottle returns.
“RiteAid is now the source of various criminal activities, including open drug use that not only affect the immediate area but spread throughout the neighborhood,” Penkin wrote. “We take pride in our neighborhood and work very hard to keep it clean, safe and livable. The RiteAid situation has become untenable, and something must be done.”
Sutton said she will seek extra patrols in the area and work with the Multnomah County District Attorney on strategic prosecutions.
Lawmakers no help
Meanwhile, Abrams has gotten no traction with local elected officials. The city “has shown amazing support for the houseless” at the expense of the rights of neighbors to live in peace and of homeowners whose property is devalued, he said.
Steiner’s Chief of Staff, Tatiana Amrein, told Abrams, “Senator Steiner sees what you are describing in her neighborhood and shares your frustration,” but “I am unsure how we can change the implementation of the Bottle Bill.
“This issue has come up periodically and changes have previously been considered,” wrote Amrein. “It has been determined in those discussions that they would cause more harm than good for individuals who do not have access to a full-service BottleDrop center, rural communities, and organizations that collect bottles and cans as donations.”
An aide to Oregon Rep. Maxine Dexter wrote, “Oregon’s Bottle Bill remains an excellent tool for reducing waste and encouraging recycling in our state. … Rep. Dexter is a strong supporter of bottle redemption and is also supportive of people supplementing their incomes by collecting and redeeming bottles and cans. This is a win-win for the environment and for community members struggling to make ends meet.”
The lawmakers are in step with the OLCC, which regulates the bottle redemption process, and the private Oregon Beverage Recycling Cooperative. According to Wikipedia, “OBRC is the industry steward for the Bottle Bill,” representing 96 percent of beverage distributors and operating BottleDrop redemption centers.
OBRC created the BottleDrop program, in which consumers drop green bags of beverage containers at stores or redemption centers and receive credits to their accounts. Participating stores can thus avoid or greatly diminish the state requirement to hand-count containers and dispense cash on the spot.
“While the OLCC oversees the Bottle Bill, OLCC's oversight over OBRC is limited,” Wikipedia stated.
All unclaimed container deposits are retained as revenue for OBRC, creating an incentive to make redemption inconvenient. In spite of this, OBRC cites studies showing Oregon redemption rates among the highest in the nation.
In response to a NW Examiner query about the Pearl RiteAid, OLCC spokesperson Matt Van Sickle referred to Oregon’s “phenomenal return rate” and assured that Oregon’s Bottle Bill system does work.”
Van Sickle said his agency “can’t change the rules” without legislative action. He took assurance in that OBRC had contacted RiteAid.
Making contact and having a solution may be two different things. Eric Chambers, vice president of strategy and outreach for OBRC, said RiteAid has shown no interest in implementing the green bag program as recommended.
Inquiries to RiteAid’s corporate offices were not answered.
“At the end of the day, the questions boils down to RiteAid’s interest in pursuing the alternative to their baseline responsibility to accept individual containers from consumers,” Chambers wrote. “We’re here to help when they’re ready.”
Asked for names of small retailers participating in the BottleDrop program, Chambers mentioned several chains but only one independent store—Ashland Food Coop. Co-op manager Zach Burrows confirmed that the store enrolled in the program in May and is pleased with the results.
“We like the program and our customers love it,” Burrows said. “It’s just so convenient.”
Why would any small retailer not use it, we asked?
“Well, it’s expensive,” he said, estimating the co-op’s upfront costs in the tens of thousands of dollars.
Cost has kept other small stores from becoming BottleDrop participants. Food Front Cooperative Grocery on Northwest Thurman Street closed this spring, struggling in its final months with bottle redemption hassles. The co-op devoted substantial staff time to hand-counting and paying out redemptions, duties for which the retailer receives only net reimbursement from the state.
The last Food Front general manager, Michael Balanof, weighed another option, a self-service “reverse vending machine.” It would have cut labor costs but he did not pursue it because he said it would have cost $90,000.
Abrams laid out his frustrations in emails to his state senator and representative.
“When you simultaneously tell me the fix has to be legislative, and that my legislator is not going to do anything, you’re basically saying you are washing your hands of the issue,” he wrote aides to Steiner and Dexter. “As a former elected official and a 15-year union president, if I took that approach, I know what my voters would have done.
“My City Council members don’t even respond and my legislators wash their hands of this serious issue. To say I am disappointed in the ‘leadership’ here in Portland would be an understatement.”