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Is it socially acceptable in Portland to take bottles and cans from strangers' recycling bins? In my old hometown, this was considered stealing—it deprived the city of revenue for the recycling program. Here, it's a cottage industry.
—Wondering
If that guy with the unicycle and bagpipes can't find the limits of social acceptability in Portland, what hope do the rest of us have? The general feeling on the matter seems to be that if you're in such bad financial shape that it's worth your time to collect cans at a nickel a pop, knock yourself out.
Bruce Walker, the city's solid waste and recycling manager, says they don't encourage such scavenging, but he notes, with bureaucratic understatement, that such a precept is "difficult to enforce."
Perhaps a better way to put it would be "not worth enforcing." Metro recycling officials report there's so little money in curbside cans and bottles they don't even bother redeeming the ones they get—they just recycle them with the rest of the glass, aluminum or plastic.
More troubling, perhaps, is the specter of turf wars among the bottle pickers. Once I was riding my bike home from the gym (I know, shut up) when a lady flagged me down because her cart of bottles had been stolen by a competing gang of bin raiders.
We spent an hour passing my iPhone back and forth trying to find a cop who spoke Hindi. (As we spoke, a passing photographer from Webster's paused to snap my picture for inclusion with their entry on "Portland liberal.")
An officer eventually materialized, and I discreetly legged it. Still, you can see why the authorities might not want to wade too deeply into this arena of law enforcement. Nobody makes money on unredeemed containers except the beverage distributors (they pocket a nickel for each can that doesn't come back), so it hardly seems worth the trouble.
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WWeek 2015
