The giveaway is the admission that the bottle bill isn't really about cleaning up the state but that, "Thousands depend on deposit redemptions to afford basic necessities." This was never intended to be a social subsidy program and just another way to keep the poor poor--and attached to crap government programs.
Oregon’s Bottle Bill, championed by Governor Tom McCall, was created to address a very specific problem of the early 1970s. At the time, there was little or no curbside recycling, disposable bottles and aluminum cans had become a major source of roadside litter, and local governments faced rising cleanup costs. The refundable deposit gave people a financial incentive to return beverage containers instead of throwing them away.
The deposit later increased from 5 cents to 10 cents not to provide income to people experiencing homelessness, but because redemption rates had fallen into the mid-60% range. Under Oregon law, that automatically triggered the increase, raising redemption rates into the mid-80% range. One limitation of using redemption rates as the primary measure of success is that they count only containers returned through the Bottle Bill, not those recycled through curbside collection. As a result, it is difficult to know how much of the earlier decline reflected less recycling versus a shift to other recycling methods—a distinction that simply did not exist when the Bottle Bill was enacted in the early 1970s.
Many people argue that the Bottle Bill has become a source of income for people struggling with drug addiction. Based on what I’ve repeatedly seen at the downtown Safeway BottleDrop, I think (I know) there is some truth to that observation. At the same time, it is important not to paint everyone who redeems containers with the same brush.
The Bottle Bill also provides supplemental income for many lower-income Oregonians who are neither drug addicts nor thieves. Through BottleDrop Plus, people who choose store credit instead of cash receive a 20% bonus, increasing the purchasing power of their refunds. The program also supports college savings and has become an important fundraising tool for schools, youth sports, charities, and other nonprofit organizations.
This gets to the point of my objection. Calls to suspend or scale back the Bottle Bill because some people misuse it address a symptom rather than the underlying problem. Doing so would penalize law-abiding Oregonians without addressing open-air drug use, chronic public disorder, or shoplifting. If those issues remain unresolved, eliminating the Bottle Bill simply removes a legitimate benefit from working families, seniors, students, and nonprofit organizations. Rather than confronting open-air drug use, chronic public disorder, and homeless encampments, policymakers are debating whether to scale back a program that benefits millions of law-abiding Oregonians.
Jason Jordan's letter is polite, well-written, and dodges every hard question in the original op-ed.
Read it again and notice what's missing. Thrasher and Keisling named a specific problem: OBRC's own plan to move a bottle drop to Powell and Milwaukie, next to one of Portland's busiest and most dangerous intersections. Jordan doesn't mention it. Not once. That's the project the proposed pause was meant to stop, and it simply vanishes from his reply.
He talks instead about "the People's Depot... operated by a community partner, not OBRC," as a point in his favor. But that phrase is the whole game. When OBRC funds a site but has a nonprofit "community partner" run it, OBRC keeps the money and hands off the operational and legal risk. The op-ed flagged exactly this pattern with the earlier alternative-access proposal. Calling it community partnership doesn't change what it is.
On transparency, watch the switch. The op-ed asked one question: OBRC keeps tens of millions every year from deposits people never redeem and from selling scrap aluminum — where does it go? Jordan answers a different question: "No state dollars fund this system." Nobody said they did. The point is that the dime on every can that never comes back stays with a private, distributor-run cooperative instead of going to the public, and OBRC won't open the books on it. "We welcome scrutiny" is not the same as showing us the numbers.
And count the commitments in the letter. There aren't any. It's "starting to evaluate," "may have an initial launch," "we hope to expand," "worth pursuing," "we remain open." No deadline, no dollar figure, nobody on the hook for anything. That's the language of an organization that wants credit for being reasonable without agreeing to do one specific thing.
He's right about exactly one thing: pull cash out overnight and the poorest people who rely on it get hurt. Fair. But that cuts against him too. The moment you admit thousands depend on this to survive, you've admitted a recycling program has quietly become a cash assistance system nobody designed — one that sends people foraging through trash bins, sometimes onto private property, to collect it. That's the problem on the ground. "We're already adapting, so don't make us pause" isn't an answer to it. The pause is aimed at the very projects he's asking us to trust him to finish.
“We’ve heard the concerns about Delta Park. We’ve heard from neighborhoods worried about where redemption activity concentrates and what that brings with it. We take those concerns seriously, which is why we are taking action.
Delta Park is closing at the end of July.”
Just a day late and a dollar short. That area has been a dumpster fire for a decade.
States without a bottle deposit have no issue recycling and are in some ways better. There is recycling receptacles anywhere there are trash cans. Portland could use more of both.
If he is concerned about people who depend on it, he would know that shopping at stores like Fred Meyers, you get an extra 20% if it’s spent in the store. If you’re so impoverished that you depend on cans, then you’d gladly take the extra 20%.
There is no justification for keeping it as a cash system, except the enablement of addicts and OBRC. OBRC quite literally makes money off of the backs of addicts, just as the cartels do.
We have a tax that is now passing through two nonprofits before it gets to those who “need” it. Just like our nonprofits we pay to “manage” the homeless/addicts. Mult Co spends $100k per homeless person, but how much of that actually reaches them?
Lipstick on a pig.
The giveaway is the admission that the bottle bill isn't really about cleaning up the state but that, "Thousands depend on deposit redemptions to afford basic necessities." This was never intended to be a social subsidy program and just another way to keep the poor poor--and attached to crap government programs.
Oregon’s Bottle Bill, championed by Governor Tom McCall, was created to address a very specific problem of the early 1970s. At the time, there was little or no curbside recycling, disposable bottles and aluminum cans had become a major source of roadside litter, and local governments faced rising cleanup costs. The refundable deposit gave people a financial incentive to return beverage containers instead of throwing them away.
The deposit later increased from 5 cents to 10 cents not to provide income to people experiencing homelessness, but because redemption rates had fallen into the mid-60% range. Under Oregon law, that automatically triggered the increase, raising redemption rates into the mid-80% range. One limitation of using redemption rates as the primary measure of success is that they count only containers returned through the Bottle Bill, not those recycled through curbside collection. As a result, it is difficult to know how much of the earlier decline reflected less recycling versus a shift to other recycling methods—a distinction that simply did not exist when the Bottle Bill was enacted in the early 1970s.
Many people argue that the Bottle Bill has become a source of income for people struggling with drug addiction. Based on what I’ve repeatedly seen at the downtown Safeway BottleDrop, I think (I know) there is some truth to that observation. At the same time, it is important not to paint everyone who redeems containers with the same brush.
The Bottle Bill also provides supplemental income for many lower-income Oregonians who are neither drug addicts nor thieves. Through BottleDrop Plus, people who choose store credit instead of cash receive a 20% bonus, increasing the purchasing power of their refunds. The program also supports college savings and has become an important fundraising tool for schools, youth sports, charities, and other nonprofit organizations.
This gets to the point of my objection. Calls to suspend or scale back the Bottle Bill because some people misuse it address a symptom rather than the underlying problem. Doing so would penalize law-abiding Oregonians without addressing open-air drug use, chronic public disorder, or shoplifting. If those issues remain unresolved, eliminating the Bottle Bill simply removes a legitimate benefit from working families, seniors, students, and nonprofit organizations. Rather than confronting open-air drug use, chronic public disorder, and homeless encampments, policymakers are debating whether to scale back a program that benefits millions of law-abiding Oregonians.
Jason Jordan's letter is polite, well-written, and dodges every hard question in the original op-ed.
Read it again and notice what's missing. Thrasher and Keisling named a specific problem: OBRC's own plan to move a bottle drop to Powell and Milwaukie, next to one of Portland's busiest and most dangerous intersections. Jordan doesn't mention it. Not once. That's the project the proposed pause was meant to stop, and it simply vanishes from his reply.
He talks instead about "the People's Depot... operated by a community partner, not OBRC," as a point in his favor. But that phrase is the whole game. When OBRC funds a site but has a nonprofit "community partner" run it, OBRC keeps the money and hands off the operational and legal risk. The op-ed flagged exactly this pattern with the earlier alternative-access proposal. Calling it community partnership doesn't change what it is.
On transparency, watch the switch. The op-ed asked one question: OBRC keeps tens of millions every year from deposits people never redeem and from selling scrap aluminum — where does it go? Jordan answers a different question: "No state dollars fund this system." Nobody said they did. The point is that the dime on every can that never comes back stays with a private, distributor-run cooperative instead of going to the public, and OBRC won't open the books on it. "We welcome scrutiny" is not the same as showing us the numbers.
And count the commitments in the letter. There aren't any. It's "starting to evaluate," "may have an initial launch," "we hope to expand," "worth pursuing," "we remain open." No deadline, no dollar figure, nobody on the hook for anything. That's the language of an organization that wants credit for being reasonable without agreeing to do one specific thing.
He's right about exactly one thing: pull cash out overnight and the poorest people who rely on it get hurt. Fair. But that cuts against him too. The moment you admit thousands depend on this to survive, you've admitted a recycling program has quietly become a cash assistance system nobody designed — one that sends people foraging through trash bins, sometimes onto private property, to collect it. That's the problem on the ground. "We're already adapting, so don't make us pause" isn't an answer to it. The pause is aimed at the very projects he's asking us to trust him to finish.
From the opinion piece:
“We’ve heard the concerns about Delta Park. We’ve heard from neighborhoods worried about where redemption activity concentrates and what that brings with it. We take those concerns seriously, which is why we are taking action.
Delta Park is closing at the end of July.”
Just a day late and a dollar short. That area has been a dumpster fire for a decade.
States without a bottle deposit have no issue recycling and are in some ways better. There is recycling receptacles anywhere there are trash cans. Portland could use more of both.
If he is concerned about people who depend on it, he would know that shopping at stores like Fred Meyers, you get an extra 20% if it’s spent in the store. If you’re so impoverished that you depend on cans, then you’d gladly take the extra 20%.
There is no justification for keeping it as a cash system, except the enablement of addicts and OBRC. OBRC quite literally makes money off of the backs of addicts, just as the cartels do.
We have a tax that is now passing through two nonprofits before it gets to those who “need” it. Just like our nonprofits we pay to “manage” the homeless/addicts. Mult Co spends $100k per homeless person, but how much of that actually reaches them?