As people lined up for hours outside Portland-area bottle return centers to make at most $35 at a time, the city of Portland funded a semi-secret system to help some people maintain that source of income.

The People’s Depot is a closed-loop system that employs eight workers and volunteers to make it easier for some people to earn income from can returns. At an undisclosed site in North Portland, people can bring their cans to a city-operated center and receive a stipend based on an estimate of how many they collected, according to the city of Portland’s Homeless Camping and Urban Reduction Program.

Anyone who knows about the People’s Depot, based at one of the city’s clinics that provides people with substance use disorders services like clean syringes and opioid overdose reversal medication, can turn in cans for money. The organizers aren’t turning anyone away. But word of the operation has been shared primarily with the vulnerable low-income clients who regularly rely on the center. They receive the same 10 cents per container they would get at grocery store, if those bottle returns were still operating.

The cans are then taken to an outdoor dumpster where they sit for at least five days as a coronavirus precaution. Then, they are sorted and picked up by the Oregon Beverage Recycling Cooperative, the service-industry group that runs the state’s beverage container return system.

The money earned from the returns then goes back to fund the stipends given to canners, as those who routinely collect bottles and cans for income are called.

For three weeks, the system has run unannounced by the city, which is paying for the eight workers and also provided upfront money before the first containers were returned. So far, the city has spent $7,018 on the program, and will continue to pay $100 a month for the sorting trailer.

The organizers hope to expand the program eventually, targeting a wider range of low-income canners, even after the COVID-19 pandemic, which prompted the depot’s creation.

The Oregon Liquor Control Commission announced it would not enforce the state’s Bottle Bill in early March, which let grocery stores off the hook for redeeming deposits on bottles and cans.

The grocery industry has long pushed back on the state requirement that stores collect beverage container returns. When groceries got slammed with customers and had to quickly put in place social distancing protocols, the liquor control commission responded by allowing a temporary reprieve.

That has mainly left about five Portland-area Bottle Drop Redemption centers, as well as many other Bottle Drop-branded centers around the state, to carry the load.

The centers are far from the central city, where many people who are homeless, or on the edge of it, live and collect cans.

The Oregon Beverage Recycling Cooperative recently opened an emergency redemption center at its headquarters in Northwest Portland.

Meanwhile, public health worker Justine Pope heard from friends who relied on bottle return income that they were struggling to get cans out to the centers and had to haul big bags around town. Others were traveling long distances or just gave up.

“I started to think how could we creatively focus on people who rely more on this type of income and are unable to keep their cans inside in a basement or garage,” Pope said.

Pope works at a site that provides harm reduction materials, such as clean syringes and naloxone, to people with substance use disorders.

She partnered with Ground Score, a group of recyclers, dumpster divers and other environmental workers who create and fill low-barrier waste management jobs. They had long been talking about wanting a bottle return system more geared to the people who rely on it most.

Ground Score adviser Taylor Cass Talbott saw an opportunity to temporarily step in during COVID-19 but also start to fill what she said has long been a hole in the system.

“Grocery stores haven’t been wanting to take care of cans and bottles for a long time,” Cass Talbott said. “So maybe in the long term, the handling of this can be done by entities that want to do that.”

The program has mainly spread by word-of-mouth from people who regularly use the harm reduction site’s services. Each week, more people show up.

So far, more than 100 people have participated in the three weeks. The depot hands out about $20 on average per person.

Cass Talbott said they are becoming more efficient every week. Because the payments are based on estimates, last week they lost about $50. But that’s out of about $2,000 worth of cans -- and the losses are getting smaller.

Most importantly to the organizers, the money is going to people who report using it for food and other basic needs. About 98% of participants are homeless or on the edge of it, and they are hit as hard as everyone else since COVID-19 restrictions shut down large segments of the economy.

“It’s really basic and critical income for a lot of people to rely on canning,” Pope said.

An 2010 Occidental College researcher’s study found that states with beverage container return laws have 11% lower petty crime rates than states without them.

The organizers hope to continue and expand the program even while advocating for the Oregon Liquor Control Commission to restart Bottle Bill enforcement. The commission announced this week that the agency has extended its decision to not cite grocery stores for refusing can returns until May 31.

And they want to enlist the organization that currently runs the bottle return system for the state -- the Oregon Beverage Recycling Cooperative -- to help cut out some of the steps involved, perhaps by cutting out the need for as extensive sorting and collecting.

“We’re thrilled to be part of the partnership,” said cooperative spokesman Joel Schoening. “There’s been a need for it for a long time and we’re glad to help make that happen now when there’s such a critical need.”

Schoening said that cooperative leadership is willing to make the program more permanent and expand it. Standalone Bottle Drops are hard to site in the central city area because of pushback from neighbors and businesses.

This model could provide a way to make it easier for low-income and homeless people to more easily return bottles and cans, even when enforcement resumes, Schoening said.

Until then, cooperative leaders are in talks with grocery industry and liquor control commission officials to ease the pressure on the remaining Bottle Drop locations.

“Oregon Beverage Recycling Cooperative anticipated what closure of retail returns would mean for access and we knew that would present some significant challenges,” Schoening said.

-- Molly Harbarger

mharbarger@oregonian.com | 503-294-5923 | @MollyHarbarger

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