Workers collect and sort recyclables and trash that would otherwise be left on the ground or shipped to landfills
The sun beats down on Audrey McCall Beach directly south of the Hawthorne Bridge, steps from the Eastbank Esplanade. Families cool off in the waters of the Willamette River, sunbathers lie on towels, and the pulse of traffic on the bridge overhead and to the east sounds like ocean waves, if you close your eyes.
A man in dark clothes and sunglasses moves methodically up and down the rocky beach. He is bent over, eyes glued to the ground. Scotty Atkins is at work this hot afternoon, turning over rocks to find shards of glass and plastic, used needles and other debris. He combs through the remains of a still-warm campfire for rusty nails.
“We don’t like signs of fire down here. It doesn’t make it child-friendly,” he says.
Atkins, who sleeps in a tent in a nearby neighborhood, has been cleaning this beach on his own time, for free, for years.
“That’s what I do; I pick up trash,” he says. “I like feeling committed to this spot because it’s where my heart is.”
Now, thanks to an innovative Portland coalition known as Ground Score, Atkins is getting paid for what he is doing, along with a growing number of other homeless people who are organizing themselves and creating jobs collecting and sorting trash.
So far, Ground Score is succeeding wildly.
The name has special significance, said Barbie Weber, a Ground Score coordinator and co-founder.
“A ground score is anything a homeless or poor person finds on the ground that aids in their survival,” she said. “It could be a cigarette butt, a can, a quarter, a 20-dollar bill, or a trinket.”
Ground Score’s concept is simple: Give homeless and poor people fair-wage jobs to collect bottles and cans for deposit and to sort plastic, metal and cigarette butts for responsible disposal – trash that would otherwise be left on the ground or shipped to landfills.
FURTHER READING: People on, off the streets work together on universal problem: garbage
In the few short months since its official creation, Ground Score has been awarded funding from the regional government Metro for training, administration and outreach. Its workers have been hired by the Human Access Project, Trash for Peace and the Central Eastside Industrial Council (CEIC). It has partnered with SOLVE – Oregon’s 50-year-old volunteer cleanup organization, founded by Gov. Tom McCall in 1969 – acting as uniquely qualified ambassadors to lead volunteer teams into homeless camps for cleanup assistance.
Ground Score is perhaps the only formal organization of its kind in the United States. There are similar organizations in Canada, such as the Binners Project in Vancouver, and there is a recycling and community center in New York City called Sure We Can, where street canners come together. But there is nothing quite like Ground Score. It has a mandate to be peer-directed and participatory, led by and for those who, for lack of sufficient resources, collect cans, bottles and other waste materials as a source of revenue or sustenance.
Weber created Ground Score with Taylor Cass Talbott and Laura Tokarski. Cass Talbott is a project officer for WIEGO, a global networking group focused on the livelihoods of the working poor, especially women, and Tokarski is the founder and director of Trash For Peace, a nonprofit that partners with affordable-housing communities, youths and families to encourage creative ways of reducing and reusing waste. Ground Score is under the nonprofit umbrella of Trash For Peace.
As someone who is experiencing homelessness, Weber holds a unique position as a bridge between the houseless and the housed. She has long been an advocate for issues such as hygiene access and low-barrier jobs for those experiencing extreme poverty. She is involved in many social justice organizations, including Street Roots, Sisters of the Road and Right 2 Survive.
Weber and Cass Talbott have been busy with the rapidly growing movement, holding monthly organizing meetings and listening sessions, conducting street outreach and visiting social service organizations around town. They are amazed at the growing response.
“There is a huge buzz on the street,” Weber said.
Willie Levenson, the leader of Human Access Project, said he is “really proud we took the risk” of hiring Ground Score. The nonprofit, dedicated to transforming the Willamette River into a vibrant resource for Portland, has raised money to hire Ground Score workers for the cleanup of Audrey McCall beach. Atkins and another Ground Score member, Christine, are each paid $15 an hour for 4½ hours a week as part of HAP’s pilot program.
HAP also hired 10 Ground Score members for cleanup during the Big Float, a fundraising river float and jazz party in July.
“If we want to have an impact on homelessness, we need a source of hope,” Levenson said. “It’s important to start looking for creative ways to integrate homeless people into Portland.”
The Central Eastside Industrial Council, representing businesses and property owners in Portland’s central eastside, has also hired Ground Score on several occasions and expects to do so again.
“Ground Score helped us navigate and humanize how to reach out to people living in tent communities,” said Bridgid Blackburn, who is on CEIC’s board of directors. “They told us to just smile and say hello. To some folks, this was a new concept. Human to human. Basic, simple. It has helped us learn how to be able to speak to people we wouldn’t speak to otherwise, especially for someone who feels intimidated.”
The program’s educational aspect is something that excites Weber.
“When we lead a group of housed people through neighborhoods to pick up trash, we teach,” she said. “We are leading housed people who don’t normally talk to homeless people, so they come with a stereotype. But when they leave, there’s not this huge gap. We also teach them about the things that look like trash but are actually useful for survival.”
For her part, Cass Talbott is committed to an aspect of Ground Score that ties in with her extensive global work. Ground Score’s volunteer development coordinator, Cass Talbott has spent much of her career working in the Global South with waste-pickers, supporting collectives organized with the intention of reducing and reusing waste and transforming the perceptions of people who sort trash as dignified wage earners with integrity and value.
“There is a deeper advocacy and intention behind Ground Score, which is to give a voice to this community and to the value of these canners,” she said. “They are cleaning the stream. If you take a can out of someone’s recycling bin and put it directly through the deposit system, that puts it into a completely different trajectory.”
FURTHER READING: Cass Talbott: Waste pickers can fill gaps in municipal waste management
The usual trajectory for curbside recyclables both on private sidewalks and public streets is likely a large container ship, headed abroad, according to Cass Talbott. That is because in most trash and recycle bins, aluminum, glass and plastics are mixed together and the labor costs of hands-on sorting is prohibitive.
“Sending our recyclable and trash abroad we now know is problematic,” Cass Talbott said. “It is arguably a form of colonialism to export our waste to other countries, where the plastics are really harming people’s health. Through the deposit system, all that is processed locally. Even though people complain about recyclers, homeless people, digging through their recycle bin or trash can, they are cleaning the stream. And they are doing better than most housed people are.”
Weber, Cass Talbott and Tokarski, together with an increasing number of supporters and peers, look forward to growing Ground Score.
“We’ve applied for another grant through Metro for more coordination support so we can start to get better metrics on how much material we are collecting, and better systems for diverting these materials so they are actually recycled and don’t go into landfills, plus data on the greenhouse gas offsets of the materials we are collecting and diverting,” Cass Talbott said.
Cleaning the storm drains and bioswales at the bridge heads on the eastside where tens of thousands of toxic cigarette butts are clogging the system is another goal of Ground Score.
And perhaps most importantly, Ground Score is a positive experience for those involved.
“In the last SOLVE event, one of the participants was in tears by the time he was done because he was just so honored that he’d been treated like a human being,” Weber said. “‘People were asking me questions,’ he said. ‘They were looking at me. They weren’t telling me to go away, get a job. They were thanking me.’”
Atkins echoed that sentiment.
“My life is getting so much better now,” he said. “I feel like a door’s open for me to be creative. I’d like to make a walkway, bring in sand for a beach. The vision is really opening up to me. I’m so grateful to Ground Score.”
GROUND SCORE
JOIN
If you would like to join Ground Score, you can attend a monthly meeting at the St. Francis Park Apartments, Southeast 11th Avenue and Stark Street. The next meeting is noon to 3 p.m. Aug. 16.
HIRE WORKERS
If you are interested in hiring Ground Score for an event or project, email groundscore@trashforpeace.org.
CREATE A LOGO
Ground Score is calling for art for its logo contest. Submissions will be accepted July 1 through Sept. 30. The prize for the logo selected is $200. Email groundscore@trashforpeace.org.
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