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Comment by claudiulodro | Hacker News Reader

As an Oregonian, I think the biggest contributor is definitely bumping the redemption value from 5 cents to 10 cents. At that price, it makes it economically viable for the homeless population to spend lots of time going around and gathering every available bottle. In my neighborhood, I even have homeless people digging through my recycling bins every few hours rummaging for bottles to cash in!

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As a kid, I earned a considerable amount of money (sometimes $5+ per day) riding my bike around and collecting cans and bottles during the summer. Those bought me a lot of MTG cards and layaway payments on the latest SNES game. Now I just set them alongside the recycling bin for the homeless as well. I feel like the neighborhood kids are really missing out on a lucrative opportunity.

In Copenhagen, many of the public litter bins have a small shelf for donating bottles. I will hold on to a bottle for longer to put it on one of these shelves, rather than in (or beside) the bin.

Picture: https://media.mnn.com/assets/images/2015/07/KBHPant-Copenhag... ("pant" is cognate with "pawn".)

You make look silly with two giant garbage bags hanging off your bike, but at the end of the day who's holding on to 20 bucks? It felt like a fortune back then, and was an honest hard days work.

>It felt like a fortune back then

That's the biggest problem for me. It was a fortune back then. My family would collect bottles all year and cash them in for a vacation. But back then it was 10c per bottle... 30 years ago. Today, it's still 10c per bottle. With inflation, that's more like 5c per bottle. Couple that with the rise in bottled water and other non-carbonated drinks that don't have deposit on them plus a lot of store brands and specialty bottles that require you to go to multiple stores to return, a whole day of collecting bottles might only net you $5. And then you have to spend another day going back and forth between Family Fare, Kroger, Meijer, Walmart, Target, and maybe even a specialty bottle store.

Even for kids, a lot of times it's not worth it for just a few bucks.

With cans, you could crush them, so they took up only a small amount of room.

When I was in 5th grade, I spend all of the breaks collecting milk- and lemonade bottles sold by our school cafeteria. If I recall correctly, they had a redemption value of 25 Pfennig (0.25 Deutsche Mark, roughly 0.12 EUR). I stored them in my locker and returned them at the end of the week. I was able to make around 20 DM (10 EUR) per week, or 80 DM per month, sometimes over 100 DM, which was a monstrous amount of money for 10 years old me.

There were a few kids doing this, so you had to be quick and know the locations where many bottles were to be found. The best spots were usually the places where the teenage "cool" kids who considered returning bottles below their dignity were hanging out, and you had to be brave enough to approach them. To this day, I remember the pure joy of finding a motherload of bottles, maybe up to 10 at once, and always leave bottles on the top of garbage cans in the city for the homeless :)

I grew up in Vermont where there was/is a 5 cent deposit on cans and a 10 or 15 cent deposit on larger bottles or liquor bottles. I did dozens of, "bottle drives" where we'd go around and ask houses if we could take their cans to raise money.

If we spent a few hours doing it we'd get a couple hundred dollars easily. But damn I've never smelt anything worse than a blue massive trash barrel filled with beers cans that are all a year or older. Worth about $20 on it's own though.

Is this actually a good thing? In Germany (esp Berlin) homeless people do this a lot, but I've seen them basically empty a whole trash container on the street to get a few bottles. While it's great there is a revenue source for the homeless; I can't help thinking that it's not a great way to do it.

Must cost a fortune to clean up the trash after people have been through them, way more than the few (euro)cents you get back...

When I was in Berlin recently it seemed ubiquitous to set redeemable bottles aside for the homeless to collect, or just hand them to homeless people directly. Seemed like only the tourists were throwing them in the trash. Not to say dumping bins doesn't happen but certaintly didn't seem like a widespread problem -- and how exactly does it cost "a fortune" to clean up a pile of trash in the street? Street cleaners are already on payroll.

In Sweden it works the same. When you are walking down the street and finish your drink, it's common courtesy to not throw it in the trash can, but instead just leave it on the ground right next to the trash can for someone to collect.

They've also basically completely mitigated the fraud aspect of this by having all machines in all grocery stores scan the UPC on the bottle to determine whether it is manufactured in Sweden. The deposit is pretty significant there too, 1 SEK, which is equivalent to about 10 cents right now.

If there is such a problem with homeless people that desperate, then perhaps it is a sign one should do something about helping the homeless.

I grew up in Norway, and while Norway certainly isn't free of homeless people, I never saw this despite a widespread bottle return system (in fact, the Norwegian company Tomra has a majority of the world "reverse vending machine" market, primarily focused on bottle returns).

Norway have had a return rate in the 95%+ range for years in large part because a variety of groups of people see empty bottles as an income source.

I think this to a large extent have also culturally solved the problem: while some people certainly throw their bottles in the bin, there's little reason not to instead put your bottle down next to it, because you know it will get picked up.

You make it sound easy. Homeless is a hard problem: most of those people are mentally ill, and do not trust the helpers. If they can live on their own without help it can well be argued they are happier that way then in a home will professional help. This is a very complex subject that I've only scratched the surface of.

Yes, but there is a significant difference between people "just" being homeless, and people being homeless and so desperate that they cause other problems. One can alleviate their problems in many ways even if one does not manage to remove homelessness.

The 95% return rate has been kept up in more recent times even if the 1-2kr deposit has become less incentive due to price increases as they added a lottery option to all the machines. [1]

So instead of collecting your deposit, you can now click a button to see if you win a price (up to 1 million NOK), and if you lose you donate it to the Red Cross.

I remember as a kid in the 80s collecting bottles at events etc, back when a bottle of Coke was 6kr so the 1 kr deposit made a difference. I feel happy these days to press the donate button though when I am in the country.

[1] https://pantelotteriet.no/english/

The simple solution is to design recycling carts with some kind of for-deposit-item hopper. Here in Portland I just set mine next to the can, since there's no chance they'll go unclaimed.

In Los Angeles, most people put them into a separate bag in their recycling bins. Then the homeless and scavengers come by and just take a single bag out of the bin without causing too much other trouble. They will occasionally dump a bin to get something at the bottom, but it's pretty rare in my experience.

I think it can eventually have some unintended consequences though. A few years back I visited Calgary and saw signs in parking lots warning people not to leave bottles in their car due to the risk of people breaking car windows just to steal bottles for their redemption value. Alberta has a 10 cent deposit for cans and bottles under 1L and 25 cent deposit for bottles over 1L. Hard to believe people would smash car windows for a couple of dollars.

At least in Portland, the window smashers are very like homeless addicts. Many stories abound of people having their window smashed in, coins looted out of the glove box, but things like $400 pair of sunglasses just left to hang out on the dashboard. One of the most frequent posts on Nextdoor here are cars getting looted in front of their houses. (We have lots of homeless scrounging for change.)

Why is it okay to pay less than minimum wage and deny benefits to what are essentially misclassified sanitation workers?

Taking bottles out of recycling bins is not doing useful labor.

And no one asked them to or hired them to do the work. It's like calling someone a street sweeper because they picked up a dime off the sidewalk. Sure it's money in their pocket but it's not exactly a job.

They’re definitely not sanitation workers. On my street the homeless constantly empty full public trash bins all over the sidewalk looking for bottles and cans.

When I visited friends at the University of Michigan in the early 00s, they would purposely leave their doors unlocked on the weekends and let the homeless come through and pick up after their parties with the tacit agreement that if anything of value went missing, the doors would be then locked. win-win

Another Oregonian checking in. I wonder if there is any correlation between rates of homelessness and redemption rate; my biased impression is that homelessness in general has only increased with my time here, as well as the rate at which I see (almost exclusively) homeless or very low income individuals recycling.

I personally will not be bothered redeeming in Oregon, since all cans and bottles have to be manually fed into the reading machine. Coming from California where I can just bring a trashcan full of cans in and get my money, I find the system a complete waste of time.

I separate out my recyclables for the canners and leave them out for whomever wants to put in the effort of standing in front of the coop for an hour.

It's not your imagination. Oregon's homeless population has been increasing several percentage points year over year [1]. It's even worse in California.

[1] https://www.oregon.gov/ohcs/ISD/RA/2017-Point-in-Time-Estima...

Michigan (see link) seems to further validate that theory.

https://fox61.com/2018/05/17/connecticut-trails-other-states...

This is exactly the scenario in Los Angeles. There is a collective army of bottle and can collectors pulling them from recycle bins and everywhere else. Bins are scoured a dozen times a day; you won't find lone can on the street anywhere.

Don't forget the part where the homeless walk down Dockweiler beach every morning and dump the garbage cans onto the sand to more easily pick through the trash to get at the cans.

What a lovely system we've created.

Oregonian here: We have had cans intended for redemption stolen from our backyard. They just took the whole bin with cans and walked off. I guess there was probably ~$25 of cans it in.

This happens a lot in SF too. I'm not sure if it actually does anything to promote recycling since the bottles were already in a recycle bin to begin with.

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