LTD Community Resource Liaison Sarah Koski (center) and Everyone Village residents Delores (left), Sam Jones (right) and Laura Hart (right) mark locations on maps for suggested locations for mobile bottle drops across Eugene and Springfield.
Rebecca Hansen-White / KLCC
Before moving to Everyone Village — a transitional housing project in West Eugene — Delores, the name she’s long been known by on the streets, pushed a grocery cart full of beer bottles for miles to reach a bottle redemption site.
She said sometimes she’d arrive only to find out they had closed early for the day.
“I wasn’t going to give them up. It was my bread and butter,” she said. “Pushing a grocery cart full of glass is heavy — and those cracks in the sidewalks — it’s work I’m telling you. It about killed me doing that. It was painful.”
She said inconsistent hours, limits on how many items stores were willing to redeem and the the challenge of hauling a heavy cart of bottles across town made making enough money to survive that much harder.
“If you don’t make it and you have to keep them,” she said, “if you’re homeless that means you don’t get to sleep that night. You have to stay awake and babysit your cans or someone’s going to come along and steal them from you.”
Delores now works at Everyone Village’s recycling redemption site — a peer-led program with no limits on how many bottles and cans a single person can redeem in a day.
That model will soon expand across Eugene with a bottle and can bus. It’s a partnership between Lane Transit District, Oregon Beverage Recycling Cooperative and Everyone Village.
Related: Portland garbage haulers to offer curbside battery recycling service
In March, Lane Transit District restricted how many items people can take on the bus citing safety and sanitation concerns. Bulky or leaky items, such as large bags of empty cans and bottles, were effectively banned.
Before making the change, LTD Community Resource Liaison Sarah Koski interviewed people on the street to find out how it would impact them.
“When it came to the restructuring of what can, and cannot, be brought onto the bus, bottles and cans was a huge thing,” she said. “Ten dollars is what you need on average to live a day on the street, and so that’s about two bags of cans. If you’re saying you can only bring one, you need two bags, (so) that’s two trips on the bus. How do you protect that one bag of cans while you’re going and canning on another?”
Koski said a mobile recycle drop could potentially solve both problems; improve the rider experience on LTD buses and provide a safe, reliable way for people experiencing homelessness to redeem bottles and cans.
“How can we support those who ride on the bus by alternative means,” she said. “That’s what I’m so excited about and why this project, and the first step in mapping the route, is so important.”
Related: Buying a mattress in Oregon? That could soon come with an extra fee
The next step of the project is deciding where the bottle drop bus should go. LTD is asking its own staff and the community. It’s also asking for input from people who have used canning in the past to make ends meet — like Everyone Village resident Sam Jones.
He suggested the area around Garfield Street and Second Avenue, which is near a Safe Sleep site.
“We’ve got a lot of people in that area that are homeless, that’s where they glean from,” he said. “That area, if we have a place to park the bus, all these guys can come out to that one particular area instead of traveling all the way out here to (Everyone Village).”
Pastor Gabe Piechowicz, executive director of Everyone Village, said their bottle drop has reduced stress and hardship for people experiencing homelessness.
It’s also been a starting point to building trust.
“It’s much like what we described happening right here at HQ,” he said. “We want that connection to healthy programs and services so folks can start to learn about them, ask questions about them, and presumably, start to access them.”
Everyone Village has already acquired a vehicle — a school bus donated by First Baptist Church — which it plans to upgrade with the help of local students.
Once areas are identified, representatives from all partners will work with local business groups to choose locations for the mobile bottle drop.
Organizers say they’re hoping to create five mobile bottle drops to serve the Eugene and Springfield area.