Taking the cash out of redemptions could benefit everyone, according to retired Fred Meyer CEO Ken Thrasher and former Secretary of State Phil Keisling
Phil and Ken are forward thinking on an issue that has been a hallmark for Oregon but has turned into an issue in many ways. A one year pause to think through the issues is a good idea. I especially like the idea to take cash out of the system and replace it with non-cash incentives
Why does there have to be a pause in order to think through solutions? One year of dumping cans and bottles wherever convenient? Alongside riverbanks and roads? How is that improving the quality of life in Portland?
We have other ways of recycling bottles and cans and that is what the majority of us do -many items being brought in for redemption have in fact been pilfered from the appropriate recycling bins in order to go trade them for drug money. You would therefore not find bottles and cans littering the environment any more than you do today.
Stemming the flow of addicts using this as a way to obtain money for drugs has an obvious positive impact on the environment in Portland. Maybe you are lucky enough not to live next to one of these bottle sites so you can still pretend to care about the environment while ignoring the bodily fluids and drug paraphernalia being littered all over these neighborhoods?
I think the issue centers on stopping bottle redemption money from being used to buy drugs, which in turn encourages shoplifting. Most people already recycle paper and plastics, so adding cans to the recycling bin is not a significant burden.
Part of the problem is that synthetic opioids are so cheap that it does not take much money to get high.
The increase in the deposit from 5 cents to 10 cents probably did not need to happen and may have unintentionally increased the incentive to steal redeemable containers.
A green bag full of bottles and cans can return roughly $8. For an addict living on the street, that can be a strong incentive to shoplift or collect stolen containers, particularly when a relatively small amount of money may be enough to purchase drugs.
I also suspect concerns about widespread litter are overstated when compared with the social costs associated with theft, addiction, and public disorder.
Im having a hard time blaming the bottle bill for some of Portlands problems…”powerful magnets for litter, illegal camping, property crime and drug dealing.” The bottle bill isn’t responsible for any of these problems and putting it on “pause” isn’t going to make them go away…Let’s deal with the real problem and ramp up our police dept. so they can put a “pause” on fentanyl
Great analysis of an increasingly frustrating problem, with some practical possible solutions. I've noticed that certain bus lines serving redemption centers are frequently overwhelmed with "Canners" getting on board with multiple bags of smelly cans, taking up an inordinate amount of space on the bus. These are always the handicapped and senior seats, with bus drivers never batting an eye (including when they don't pay their fare). So this problem includes many more people than simply the poor neighbors of these redemption sites.
While I'm enthused about this creative way to clean up neighborhoods and more effectively fund Canners for their labor, can you imagine any local politicians supporting such an endeavor? Lisa Reynolds? The DSA cabal on the City Council? JVP or Meghan Moyer? Our current Governor? Most of the State Legislators from the Portland Metro area? Call me a curmudgeon, but I can't envision anything practical that benefits our neighborhoods and their taxpayers as being of interest to the elites in charge.
I think this is interesting and am still absorbing it. Changing the character of Portland like this, to essentially accommodate individuals like in the photo who are breaking the law by their possession of narcotics, seems like surrender, rather than progress. And what about people who are homeless but not addicted, who after staying in a shelter like required, want to make some cash and serve a legitimate public function. I am skeptical that doing away with bottle recycling is going to drive down the number of people using drugs publicly. I believe people using drugs like this individual should be arrested on the spot and charged with possession of narcotics or other illegal drugs. They should spend some time in jail, perhaps a week, so that they can detox. Adversity can sometimes change people's habits.
Thrasher and Keisling's instinct — get cash out of a system that's become a magnet for crime and disorder — is sound. But the proposal rests on an assumption worth examining: that public institutions here can actually administer the cashless alternatives being floated.
There's reason for caution. Multnomah County's own Health Department has, by its own admission, been unable to fully account for gift cards and cash-equivalent incentives distributed in recent years — initial reporting put the figure above $150,000, with later review suggesting it may run higher. County policy required staff to log each card within five business days; in a notable share of cases, that didn't happen, and the gap surfaced only after media inquiries prompted a closer look.
That's not proof that any future redemption-credit system would fail in the same way. Gift cards handed out by a health department for outreach and volunteer recognition are a different administrative challenge than a statewide deposit-redemption system, and better design — clearer point-of-issue tracking, a narrower set of authorized vendors — could plausibly avoid the same failure mode. But it's at least a relevant data point.
Before assuming that EBT credits, gift cards, or utility offsets can simply replace cash payouts to canners, a fair question is who would be responsible for tracking and auditing that system, and whether the agencies likely to run it have shown they can do so reliably elsewhere.
The authors' three-point plan — pause, transparency, stakeholder convening — is reasonable on its own terms. A fourth item belongs on that agenda: before committing to a credit-based model, who is accountable for making sure the credits actually reach the people they're meant to help, and how would anyone know if they didn't?
If we really want to solve the problem, eliminate the bottle bill and the mandatory deposit. Only 10 states in the U.S. have container deposit laws, and reducing that number to nine is unlikely to have any meaningful effect on the trajectory of global warming.
Let’s be honest: many of the proposed alternatives would require creating new bureaucracy to administer them. At this point, it simply seems easier to repeal the bottle bill and deposit. If Oregon makes meaningful progress on homelessness and addiction over the next five to ten years, the state could always revisit the idea of a deposit system in the future.
This is another example of how Oregon has allowed a relatively small number of people struggling with addiction and chronic disorder to diminish the quality of life for everyone else. It goes back to a question I’ve raised before: how can such a small number of people do so much damage to this city and state?
Has the author of this article ever traveled through states that have no recycling incentives? Cans and broken bottles everywhere. I had newly transplanted renter from OK that threw a can out of my car window while we were driving. He thought I was nuts when I called him on it. This NIMBY preoccupation with homeless folks is driving some really weird 'solutions.'
Your “renter from OK” has a personality problem that is completely separate from issues being discussed here related to the bottle bill. Throwing trash out a window of a moving car is criminal, and frankly doesn’t speak well about his character. I have never had a thought “well, I can’t throw this can out the window because I’m losing a dime”, my thought process (and I think most stable human beings) is I don’t throw trash into the environment.
And your comment about NIMBYism is interesting/troubling? given the picture of the homeless person at the start of this article. How is it NIMBYism to offer solutions to a program that obviously needs adjustments to better serve the homeless population?
These are common-sense solutions voiced by people who actually know what they're talking about--anathema to our current political machine apparatchiks. Don't they get it? The bottle bill had nothing whatsoever to do with the environment; it was a build-better-bureaucracies effort to keep Homelessness Inc. supplied with clients, a bone to be picked by a nonprofit money laundry, and potential new union membership.
Every state and city policy is based, as far as I can tell, on one or two premises: more extortion of citizens for social benefits that never seem to occur, and decisions by people with no skin in the game and lavish PR budgets.
Thank you for your continued advocacy on this issue that is now primarily a tool of enablement, just like handing out pipes and foil is. We are quite literally paying drug dealers, cartels, and helping keep people sick; all while OBRC blames it on law enforcement and rakes in the dough.
Many people still use the “environment” as an excuse to continue this enablement. They say if we get rid of this bill there will be bottles littered all over the state. I just drove across the country to VA and somehow all of these states were cleaner than Oregon, despite none of them having a bottle bill! They also had trash and recycling receptacles everywhere, something we could use more of.
Taking cash out of the equation is the way to go. It’s not perfect, but if our deposits are now a “social service,” as the advocates claim, helping people buy necessities is extremely reasonable. EBT has restrictions on what can be purchased. Why should bottle deposits be any different?
Im happy the Brooklyn & Clinton NAs are pushing back, because frankly, we give enough to the drug addicted and the nonprofits. The NAs are also being much nicer than they should have to be. The only people who like the bottle bill are addicts, their enablers and people making money off of this system.
Failure is creating a contingency for a policy or procedure that now doesn't work. The "doesn't work" part are the addicts who are using a legitimate and previously successful system to generate quick cash for more drugs. The solution is not to accommodate the addicts (contingency), but to prevent the problem in the first place. An example: if an employee is late for work everyday, you don't change the schedule to accommodate their lateness. You fire them. Failure is discussing the problem, but not addressing the conditions that gave rise to the problem. Our 10 year social experiment to normalize illegal and destructive behavior needs to end. Our Bottle Bill stands with other landmark issues like not privatizing our beaches. These are core progressive values here, and now even those are under attack. As a local business owner, we are exhausted trying to navigate these endless policy drifts designed to empower those who only have immediate self interests and not those of us who spend ungodly amounts of time, money and energy trying to just keep our parking lots clean, entries unblocked, customer's cars not vandalized and on and on. Unless there is a dramatic change in how our local governments address the current crisis (a crisis created by those same local governments) we will be closing.
Time's up Portland. It may already be too late, but the first step is to not only stop coddling and accommodating Illegal behavior, but start using language that is accurate. The people who stole our truck batteries are not my "house-less neighbors". The people who siphon our gas and vandalize our cars are not my "house-less neighbors. The people who leave disgusting fecal presents at our entry (about 100 times) are not my "house-less neighbors". The needles and foil and garbage left for us to clean up are not my "house-less neighbors.".....and on and on. They are thieves and drug addicts. And Multnomah County, sadly, celebrates them. Poor things. They have led a "harmed" life, are no longer "centered" and are legitimized by being "trauma informed". By the way, when did "Canner" become a profession? I don't see that listed on the state, county or city business license forms. Our city / county is reeling from misinformed and misdirected local governments that have sacrificed massive amounts of money.....for what?
We met with every public official we could in 2016 trying to inform and warn them of the coming Fentanyl and P2P crisis. They weren't listening then. They aren't listening now. Portland will soon look like South Central LA, circa 1984 unless there is a dramatic change. That change being: more police and jail beds. Not changing programs and policies that adapt to accommodating more......"house-less" neighbors.
Phil and Ken are forward thinking on an issue that has been a hallmark for Oregon but has turned into an issue in many ways. A one year pause to think through the issues is a good idea. I especially like the idea to take cash out of the system and replace it with non-cash incentives
Why does there have to be a pause in order to think through solutions? One year of dumping cans and bottles wherever convenient? Alongside riverbanks and roads? How is that improving the quality of life in Portland?
That seems to be the Oregon way. As the op-ed lays out, there are many organizations involved and several aspects of the law to address.
If you have a leaky faucet, you don't try to fix it unless you first turn off the water.
We have other ways of recycling bottles and cans and that is what the majority of us do -many items being brought in for redemption have in fact been pilfered from the appropriate recycling bins in order to go trade them for drug money. You would therefore not find bottles and cans littering the environment any more than you do today.
Stemming the flow of addicts using this as a way to obtain money for drugs has an obvious positive impact on the environment in Portland. Maybe you are lucky enough not to live next to one of these bottle sites so you can still pretend to care about the environment while ignoring the bodily fluids and drug paraphernalia being littered all over these neighborhoods?
I think the issue centers on stopping bottle redemption money from being used to buy drugs, which in turn encourages shoplifting. Most people already recycle paper and plastics, so adding cans to the recycling bin is not a significant burden.
Part of the problem is that synthetic opioids are so cheap that it does not take much money to get high.
The increase in the deposit from 5 cents to 10 cents probably did not need to happen and may have unintentionally increased the incentive to steal redeemable containers.
A green bag full of bottles and cans can return roughly $8. For an addict living on the street, that can be a strong incentive to shoplift or collect stolen containers, particularly when a relatively small amount of money may be enough to purchase drugs.
I also suspect concerns about widespread litter are overstated when compared with the social costs associated with theft, addiction, and public disorder.
Im having a hard time blaming the bottle bill for some of Portlands problems…”powerful magnets for litter, illegal camping, property crime and drug dealing.” The bottle bill isn’t responsible for any of these problems and putting it on “pause” isn’t going to make them go away…Let’s deal with the real problem and ramp up our police dept. so they can put a “pause” on fentanyl
Ha, "pause" on fentanyl...good one👍
Great analysis of an increasingly frustrating problem, with some practical possible solutions. I've noticed that certain bus lines serving redemption centers are frequently overwhelmed with "Canners" getting on board with multiple bags of smelly cans, taking up an inordinate amount of space on the bus. These are always the handicapped and senior seats, with bus drivers never batting an eye (including when they don't pay their fare). So this problem includes many more people than simply the poor neighbors of these redemption sites.
While I'm enthused about this creative way to clean up neighborhoods and more effectively fund Canners for their labor, can you imagine any local politicians supporting such an endeavor? Lisa Reynolds? The DSA cabal on the City Council? JVP or Meghan Moyer? Our current Governor? Most of the State Legislators from the Portland Metro area? Call me a curmudgeon, but I can't envision anything practical that benefits our neighborhoods and their taxpayers as being of interest to the elites in charge.
I'd love to be surprised though!
I think this is interesting and am still absorbing it. Changing the character of Portland like this, to essentially accommodate individuals like in the photo who are breaking the law by their possession of narcotics, seems like surrender, rather than progress. And what about people who are homeless but not addicted, who after staying in a shelter like required, want to make some cash and serve a legitimate public function. I am skeptical that doing away with bottle recycling is going to drive down the number of people using drugs publicly. I believe people using drugs like this individual should be arrested on the spot and charged with possession of narcotics or other illegal drugs. They should spend some time in jail, perhaps a week, so that they can detox. Adversity can sometimes change people's habits.
"Better yet, a more robust green bag program could include these and potentially other cashless redemption options:
• Adding redemption funds directly to electronic Oregon EBT (food assistance) cards;
• Issuing non-cashable gift cards for use at participating retailers;
• Providing rent, housing or utility credits;
• Offsetting medical or insurance costs."
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Thrasher and Keisling's instinct — get cash out of a system that's become a magnet for crime and disorder — is sound. But the proposal rests on an assumption worth examining: that public institutions here can actually administer the cashless alternatives being floated.
There's reason for caution. Multnomah County's own Health Department has, by its own admission, been unable to fully account for gift cards and cash-equivalent incentives distributed in recent years — initial reporting put the figure above $150,000, with later review suggesting it may run higher. County policy required staff to log each card within five business days; in a notable share of cases, that didn't happen, and the gap surfaced only after media inquiries prompted a closer look.
That's not proof that any future redemption-credit system would fail in the same way. Gift cards handed out by a health department for outreach and volunteer recognition are a different administrative challenge than a statewide deposit-redemption system, and better design — clearer point-of-issue tracking, a narrower set of authorized vendors — could plausibly avoid the same failure mode. But it's at least a relevant data point.
Before assuming that EBT credits, gift cards, or utility offsets can simply replace cash payouts to canners, a fair question is who would be responsible for tracking and auditing that system, and whether the agencies likely to run it have shown they can do so reliably elsewhere.
The authors' three-point plan — pause, transparency, stakeholder convening — is reasonable on its own terms. A fourth item belongs on that agenda: before committing to a credit-based model, who is accountable for making sure the credits actually reach the people they're meant to help, and how would anyone know if they didn't?
If we really want to solve the problem, eliminate the bottle bill and the mandatory deposit. Only 10 states in the U.S. have container deposit laws, and reducing that number to nine is unlikely to have any meaningful effect on the trajectory of global warming.
Let’s be honest: many of the proposed alternatives would require creating new bureaucracy to administer them. At this point, it simply seems easier to repeal the bottle bill and deposit. If Oregon makes meaningful progress on homelessness and addiction over the next five to ten years, the state could always revisit the idea of a deposit system in the future.
This is another example of how Oregon has allowed a relatively small number of people struggling with addiction and chronic disorder to diminish the quality of life for everyone else. It goes back to a question I’ve raised before: how can such a small number of people do so much damage to this city and state?
Has the author of this article ever traveled through states that have no recycling incentives? Cans and broken bottles everywhere. I had newly transplanted renter from OK that threw a can out of my car window while we were driving. He thought I was nuts when I called him on it. This NIMBY preoccupation with homeless folks is driving some really weird 'solutions.'
Your “renter from OK” has a personality problem that is completely separate from issues being discussed here related to the bottle bill. Throwing trash out a window of a moving car is criminal, and frankly doesn’t speak well about his character. I have never had a thought “well, I can’t throw this can out the window because I’m losing a dime”, my thought process (and I think most stable human beings) is I don’t throw trash into the environment.
And your comment about NIMBYism is interesting/troubling? given the picture of the homeless person at the start of this article. How is it NIMBYism to offer solutions to a program that obviously needs adjustments to better serve the homeless population?
Oh such good ideas. Someone smarter than me will figure out the details. I loved the bottle bill but we need dramatic changes. Now.
These are common-sense solutions voiced by people who actually know what they're talking about--anathema to our current political machine apparatchiks. Don't they get it? The bottle bill had nothing whatsoever to do with the environment; it was a build-better-bureaucracies effort to keep Homelessness Inc. supplied with clients, a bone to be picked by a nonprofit money laundry, and potential new union membership.
Every state and city policy is based, as far as I can tell, on one or two premises: more extortion of citizens for social benefits that never seem to occur, and decisions by people with no skin in the game and lavish PR budgets.
This is a sensible, intelligent, sane suggested course of action.
Thank you for your continued advocacy on this issue that is now primarily a tool of enablement, just like handing out pipes and foil is. We are quite literally paying drug dealers, cartels, and helping keep people sick; all while OBRC blames it on law enforcement and rakes in the dough.
Many people still use the “environment” as an excuse to continue this enablement. They say if we get rid of this bill there will be bottles littered all over the state. I just drove across the country to VA and somehow all of these states were cleaner than Oregon, despite none of them having a bottle bill! They also had trash and recycling receptacles everywhere, something we could use more of.
Taking cash out of the equation is the way to go. It’s not perfect, but if our deposits are now a “social service,” as the advocates claim, helping people buy necessities is extremely reasonable. EBT has restrictions on what can be purchased. Why should bottle deposits be any different?
Im happy the Brooklyn & Clinton NAs are pushing back, because frankly, we give enough to the drug addicted and the nonprofits. The NAs are also being much nicer than they should have to be. The only people who like the bottle bill are addicts, their enablers and people making money off of this system.
Failure is creating a contingency for a policy or procedure that now doesn't work. The "doesn't work" part are the addicts who are using a legitimate and previously successful system to generate quick cash for more drugs. The solution is not to accommodate the addicts (contingency), but to prevent the problem in the first place. An example: if an employee is late for work everyday, you don't change the schedule to accommodate their lateness. You fire them. Failure is discussing the problem, but not addressing the conditions that gave rise to the problem. Our 10 year social experiment to normalize illegal and destructive behavior needs to end. Our Bottle Bill stands with other landmark issues like not privatizing our beaches. These are core progressive values here, and now even those are under attack. As a local business owner, we are exhausted trying to navigate these endless policy drifts designed to empower those who only have immediate self interests and not those of us who spend ungodly amounts of time, money and energy trying to just keep our parking lots clean, entries unblocked, customer's cars not vandalized and on and on. Unless there is a dramatic change in how our local governments address the current crisis (a crisis created by those same local governments) we will be closing.
Time's up Portland. It may already be too late, but the first step is to not only stop coddling and accommodating Illegal behavior, but start using language that is accurate. The people who stole our truck batteries are not my "house-less neighbors". The people who siphon our gas and vandalize our cars are not my "house-less neighbors. The people who leave disgusting fecal presents at our entry (about 100 times) are not my "house-less neighbors". The needles and foil and garbage left for us to clean up are not my "house-less neighbors.".....and on and on. They are thieves and drug addicts. And Multnomah County, sadly, celebrates them. Poor things. They have led a "harmed" life, are no longer "centered" and are legitimized by being "trauma informed". By the way, when did "Canner" become a profession? I don't see that listed on the state, county or city business license forms. Our city / county is reeling from misinformed and misdirected local governments that have sacrificed massive amounts of money.....for what?
We met with every public official we could in 2016 trying to inform and warn them of the coming Fentanyl and P2P crisis. They weren't listening then. They aren't listening now. Portland will soon look like South Central LA, circa 1984 unless there is a dramatic change. That change being: more police and jail beds. Not changing programs and policies that adapt to accommodating more......"house-less" neighbors.