Canners scrape together an income on other people’s trash
By C.W. Walker, Zack Standlee, John Lawrence and Hallie Clayton
Portland State University Street Roots Captstone Class
It’s 2 a.m. on a recent Monday. Larry Weber keeps a watchful eye out for the individuals that harassed him last week. The city trash receptacle in front of him holds five or six cans that are returnable for deposit. Cans that will make it to the recycling center instead of the city dump. Weber reaches for the cans just as a man emerges from the shadows and starts to approach him.
Weber braced himself for the worst. As the man drew near, however, instead of the usual dehumanizing, “Get out of the trash you effin bum” that Weber hears periodically throughout his week, the man says, “Thanks for recycling,” and hands him a bag full of beer cans.”
According to the Container Recycling Institute, more than 100 billion beverage cans and bottles have been landfilled, littered, and incinerated in the U.S. this year alone. In fact, according to the institute, Americans waste about 425 beverage containers per capita per year — twice as many as we recycle. For the homeless can collector, that’s money down the drain. Many people on the streets who collect cans find their returns in garbage cans instead of the recycling bins and bottle returns where they belong. The homeless in their persistence and consistency to collect cans, bottles, and plastics for deposits, help keep recyclables out of our landfills and the litter off our streets.
Especially after the weekend, the bottle returns at local grocery outlets, with their sticky floors and stale beer smells, have become an alternative for people experiencing poverty. Regulars gather, pushing shopping carts and carrying plastic bags filled with their nightly pickings of cans and bottles.
Making an average of between $5 and $10 a day, and as much as $65 for a weekend, the people Street Roots’ talked to for this story prefer collecting cans and bottles to begging for money. They have regular nightly routes. Some use the money to purchase their meals, some travel great distances, working long hours to achieve meager yet respectable returns.
Aside from the long hours and many miles on foot each day, the task of collecting returnables for income is becoming increasingly difficult as people are saving their cans and returning them themselves, according to Keith Butler, a canner who works the Northwest Portland neighborhoods.
Many homeless canners find a trickle of independence, work ethic, and worthwhile activity as they labor for either their daily bread, or to reach the important goal of getting back on their feet and off the streets.
Since Oregon’s adoption of the “Bottle Bill” program in 1972, the state reports an 84 percent success rate, a rate higher than California, New York and Hawaii. Yet Oregon is still behind Hawaii’s inclusion of recycling juice and tea containers.
As dawn’s sunlight creeps up the pavement at the Burnside Fred Meyer, Weber concludes his morning returns. He seems oblivious to the early morning chill as he packs up his belongings, sanitizes his hands, and stows his New Seasons shopping cart in an inconspicuous corner. Sporting winter garb and a salt-and-pepper beard, Weber, 52, speaks with the clarity befitting a personality on National Public Radio. When faced with medical complications and an economy on the onset of a recession, he found himself living on the streets in 2006.
“I tried panhandling for 10 minutes. I sat there with a sign that said ‘Homeless. Anything helps,’ and after 10 minutes, I said I can’t do this. I have to work for my money,” Weber says.
Weber enjoys the gratification of a hard day’s work and the feelings of self-sufficiency, he holds himself to a code of courtesy, only collecting cans from dumpsters downtown at night, and makes a habit of leaving no trace of his presence after the collection.
Unfortunately, canning is not without its perils.
“You gotta deal with live rats, unkempt syringes, and people that want to come up and challenge you to a fight for no good reason, or say you’re on their territory.” Weber says.
While he occasionally faces adversity and insults, the working public frequently gives him praise for working hard and for helping to keep Oregon green. Weber maintains a positive outlook on his work, his only complaints being people who smash or deface containers, making them unreturnable. And although Oregon expanded the bottle bill to include bottled waters in 2009, Weber points out that we are still behind in comparison to Hawaii’s bill, which includes deposits for both fruit drinks and teas.
Picking soda cans out of public trash receptacles in the middle of a populated city is hardly an activity that some would consider respectable. Portland’s homeless, inadvertently, are helping Oregon to stay green while lessening the carbon footprint on our planet.
Like Weber, Cassius Thompson, 40, spends most of his early mornings collecting cans and bottles. Wearing a dark blue parka and an Atlanta Braves cap, Thompson, a native Alaskan, fell into legal problems that eventually led to his homelessness.
“I got out of prison in 2001 and had a job, a place to stay, and an old lady on the coast. (Then) I received a paper telling me that I had to report to the Estate Hotel (parolee housing). I got a job at Walmart, and moved into an Oxford house. I worked for six months until they found out about my past and fired me.”
Thompson prefers collecting cans and bottles to asking people for money.
“It’s better than panhandling. People get upset when you panhandle. I got a route; first I hit the radio station near the Make-A-Wish Foundation, then Boy Scouts of America, and up to Lovejoy to a place we call the “Money Pit.”
Henry L. Scalf saved enough from canning to get himself and his spouse off the streets.
Scalf and his wife entered a sublease agreement with another couple, who he says turned out to be addicts and smoked up all of their money in one month. When the landlord evicted the new couple, he also evicted Scalf and his wife. Troubled as to what to do, Scalf picked up the business of canning. He found the St. John’s neighborhood to be a gold mine.
“I used to make $60 to $65 between Sunday evening and Monday mornings…enough to let me keep money in the bank and live off of what I got from those cans.”
Now the Scalfs have a studio apartment downtown. Even so, part of their much-needed income comes from canning because the Social Security check he receives is scarcely enough to cover expenses. Scalf also faced serious health issues recently with no health insurance to pay for the bills.
“My rent is $530, and my phone costs $30 a month. My check is only $584…I pay a lot of co-pay from just getting over cancer,” says Scalf.
At the time of this interview, Scalf was on his way to collect enough cans to pay for his dog Gizmo’s license. Gizmo has become his canning sidekick, though the Shih Tsu tends to be more curious about the smells he encounter’s on the Max line than the returns.