This Program Keeps Portland Clean—and Offers Unhoused People Some Dignity
This story was originally published by Grist and Street Roots and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
On a Thursday morning in Portland’s Old Town neighborhood, two dozen people mill around a warehouse, waiting for the results of a lottery. At 7:45 sharp, a woman sitting in an interior office calls out three numbers in quick succession. She repeats the last one a few times before someone finally comes forward: “234?” she says into the crowd. “Who’s 234?”
Chris Parker is 234. He is tall and thin and wears Garneau cycling gloves and a baseball cap from the power tools company DeWalt. “Are you kidding me?” he says, happy and shocked. Across the room, one of the other selectees—number 237—does a kind of end-zone victory dance, shimmying with arms above his head.
The lottery determines who will participate in that day’s waste collection program from Ground Score Association, a Portland-based collective for people who “create and fill low-barrier waste materials management jobs.” Through this particular program, called GLITTER (short for Ground Score Leading Inclusively Together Through Environmental Recovery), Parker will join a group of Ground Score employees on a four-hour walk around Portland, clearing sidewalks of plastic and other trash. At the end of the shift, he’ll get $80 in cash—$4.55 more per hour than the Portland metro area minimum wage.
Participating in the lottery doesn’t require passing a drug or sobriety test or providing a social security number. It’s meant to provide low-barrier employment to people who might otherwise struggle to find or keep a job.
Parker, for example, tells me he totaled his car last summer—the latest in a string of misfortunes. He says he used to work at a rail yard on the Columbia River, but he was laid off when he got Covid. It’s been difficult to find a stable job, he says, especially one that pays enough for the “affordable” apartments he sees advertised at $1,300 a month. For now he’s living in a small apartment near Ground Score’s headquarters.
One of Ground Score’s GLITTER teams poses for a photo mid-route.Courtesy of Ground Score
Most people are homeless when they start working with Ground Score. But after a year on payroll, there’s an 80 percent chance they will have secured housing, according to the organization.
Terrance Freeman, one of the employees leading a GLITTER group on Thursday, wears wraparound sports sunglasses and a yellow scarf. He’s been working at Ground Score for six months. Previously, he worked at a nearby Chevron gas station and struggled with alcohol. Another member of his group, Dana Detten—a.k.a. Peanut—was homeless for eight years and worked various jobs at Dollar Tree and FedEx before joining the GLITTER program. Kevin Grigsby, the lankiest of the team, says he came to the organization while trying to overcome mental health issues and a “huge cocaine problem.” Now he’s splitting a $630-a-month garage apartment on Portland’s outskirts with his girlfriend.
“If Ground Score didn’t hire me I would be on a different path,” Grigsby says, using a long grabber tool to pinch up an Oreo wrapper.
Grigsby and the other people employed by Ground Score are “waste pickers,” a catch-all term for the 20 million people worldwide who make a living collecting, sorting, recycling, and selling discarded materials. In recent years, waste pickers have fought for their work to be recognized and formalized in the global plastics treaty being negotiated by the United Nations.
Ground Score, which sees its mission as building community while also “changing society’s perceptions of what and who is considered valuable,” shows what that recognition and formalization look like on a local level. It’s a model with huge potential, given the urgent global need to create stronger social safety nets and combat the growing plastic waste crisis. Could it work in other cities, too?
Waste pickers tend to work outside of governments’ formal waste management programs, meaning the services they provide—keeping streets clean, ensuring high recycling rates, sifting hazardous e-waste out of landfills—are underappreciated and poorly remunerated.
The International Alliance of Waste Pickers, or IAWP, which represents unions, collectives, and organizations across 34 countries, says waste pickers manage as much as 80 percent of some cities’ municipal waste, with the highest percentages in developing countries that lack extensive waste management infrastructure. One study from 2020 estimated that waste pickers collect 58 percent of all the plastic that ever gets recycled. They boost recovery rates for cardboard, aluminum, and other metals too.
Members of the Asociación Cooperativa de Recicladores de Bogotá (Waste Pickers Association of Bogotá) work in a warehouse in Colombia’s capital city in 2015. Juan Arredondo / Getty Images via Grist
Waste pickers also recover e-waste—often so they can sell the metals inside electronics—as well as textiles that can still be worn, repaired, or refashioned into new goods.
In some jurisdictions, including Oregon, waste pickers collect aluminum cans and plastic bottles in order to claim a rebate determined by a so-called “bottle bill”—a law that tacks an extra 5 to 15 cent deposit onto the containers’ purchase price. But these policies are a relative rarity. Within the US, only nine other states and Guam have one, and the majority of similar laws internationally are concentrated in Europe, Canada, and Australia. Waste pickers in poorer countries often have to buy or sell their wares directly to recycling companies or brokers, and they can’t rely on a government-mandated return rate per item collected.
These activities not only provide waste pickers with a living, they also help to address climate change. According to one study published in March, a subset of waste pickers in just one city—Salvador, Brazil—helped avoid more than 27,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions between 2010 and 2022, mostly by enabling recycling that displaced the need for raw materials like aluminum and PET, the kind of plastic used in water bottles. (For context, that’s about the amount emitted by 6,300 gasoline-powered cars in a year.) Removing paper and cardboard from landfills also reduces emissions, because these materials would otherwise release methane—a potent greenhouse gas—as they decompose.
Waste pickers’ services have recently gained attention thanks to negotiations for a binding United Nations treaty to “end plastic pollution,” which began in early 2022 and are ongoing. One paper published last year, quoting an unnamed negotiator, described waste pickers as “the human face” of the treaty, since they’re on the front lines of plastic pollution.
In the negotiations, the IAWP has allied with many countries and environmental groups that want to put limits on global plastic production. But it’s also calling for the treaty to include a distinct article ensuring a “just transition” for waste pickers whose livelihoods could be at risk from greater formalization of the waste management sector. Broadly, IAWP wants countries to build better waste management systems around the work waste pickers are already doing, instead of bringing in private companies that would take their place.
Ground Score is showing how to implement that goal on a small scale—in part through partnerships with city, county, and state government, but also through a participatory organizational structure that gives waste pickers a sense of ownership over Ground Score’s activities. Workers in the program “feel like it’s a privilege that they can actually help their own community rather than just perpetuating this culture of, you know, giving and taking ‘handouts,’” says Taylor Cass Talbott, Ground Score’s co-executive director, who is also the advocacy director for the IAWP.
Cass Talbott, Laura Tokarski, and Barbra Weber co-founded Ground Score in 2019 as a “peer-led initiative,” meaning it would be organized by and for the city’s waste pickers. Weber had been collecting cans in Portland since 2015—she had previously worked in marketing, but a brain lesion affected her ability to speak and put her on the street. Tokarski had already founded the Portland-based Trash for Peace, a nonprofit that engagess with communities to reduce and reuse waste. Ground Score is now fiscally sponsored by Trash for Peace.
In contrast to most waste pickers’ activities, Ground Score’s GLITTER program doesn’t focus on recovering and selling recyclable material. According to one of the organization’s co-directors, Nic Boehm, 26 percent of what participants collect is nonrecyclable “microtrash,” like cigarette butts. Much of the rest is food wrappers, containers, plastic bags, needles—things that can’t be recycled and are instead destined for landfills or incinerators.
Ground Score employees at The People’s Depot pay cash for the cans and bottles that canners drop off.Brodie Cass Talbott
GLITTER’s workers are compensated thanks to funding from the City of Portland’s Homelessness and Urban Camping Impact Reduction Program, as well as contracts with local businesses associations. The Homeless Services Department, a partnership between Portland and overlapping Multnomah County, has also supported the program through funds raised by a 2020 “supportive housing services” tax, though a department spokesperson told Grist that funding for “employment programs” like GLITTER may be reduced in the 2026 budget.
GLITTER highlights the value that waste pickers provide outside the recycling value chain, by keeping city streets clean. “Trash attracts other trash,” Boehm tells me as his group sweeps up fast food containers and wrappers around an overflowing garbage can. The goal is to keep the buildup at bay.
Ground Score also has another program that more closely resembles the type of waste picking that is common in other jurisdictions. It’s called The People’s Depot, and it serves as a dropoff point for those who collect and sell used cans and bottles, who are sometimes called “canners.” The people who visit the depot gather empty water bottles and aluminum cans, whether from the side of the road or from unsorted residential recycling bins, and then lug them to a small lot underneath the Morrison Bridge, in Portland’s Central Eastside neighborhood.
At the depot, canners sell their goods for 10 cents a pop—a value assigned to them by the current version of Oregon’s 54-year-old bottle bill. Ground Score’s payroll employees, some of whom are current or former canners, dole out more than $4,000 in cash each day. The money comes from beverage companies that pay into the Oregon Beverage Recycling Cooperative, a nonprofit that manages implementation of the bottle bill. Deposited bottles are hauled off at the end of each day to an Oregon Beverage Recycling Cooperative warehouse, where they’re weighed so that Ground Score can be reimbursed for their value.
Kris Brown is the operational manager at The People’s Depot. He’s worked there since 2021, but before that, starting in 2016, he made a living collecting cans—one night a week in Portland’s Southeast quadrant, a couple nights a week near Willamette Park in Southwest. Apartment complex dumpsters were hotspots, he says, because many apartment buildings lacked a separate recycling bin, meaning there would be lots of cans and bottles to pull out. Brown lived in tent camps around town, and under Portland’s Tilikum Crossing bridge during the earliest days of the Covid pandemic.
“There’s this stigma that if you’re homeless, then you’re useless. Like, ‘Why don’t you get a real job?’” he says. “But collecting bottles and cans — it is work. It wasn’t enough money to get a house or an apartment, but it was enough for me that I didn’t have to go begging or steal anything. I could be me and feel good about it.”
Where deposit return systems do exist, the data suggests that they play a big part in boosting the number of containers that get reclaimed and recycled. According to an industry estimate, cans covered by deposit systems are recycled in the US at a rate of 74 percent, compared to the national average of 43 percent. Plastic bottles eligible for a deposit are returned at rates of up to 81 percent, compared to a national average of under 30 percent (although not all of what’s collected is ultimately recycled due to technological and economic limitations on plastic recycling).
Canners congregate at The People’s Depot in Portland’s Central Eastside neighborhood. Brodie Cass Talbott
In Portland, The People’s Depot offers an alternative to deposit locations attached to supermarkets and convenience stores, where waste pickers say they’re treated with disdain by shoppers and passersby. Last year, hundreds of Portlanders blocked a new bottle dropoff location proposed in the neighborhood of St. Johns. They cited “safety” concerns and a “potential increase in crime or vandalism.”
Brown, who regularly invites mutual aid groups and a mobile library to visit The People’s Depot so its patrons can benefit from free books and food, calls the program a “more humanizing experience.” He suggests it could be a model for scaling up waste picker-led recycling programs in other cities. “It becomes more of a community space for [canners] to show up to,” he says. “And the community shows that respect back to us.”
Ground Score has had a presence at all five negotiating sessions for the global plastics treaty so far. Weber and Cass Talbott helped draft the IAWP’s 2023 report, “Vision for a Just Transition for Waste Pickers under the UN Plastics Treaty,” which describes the environmental importance of waste pickers’ work.
The report calls for, among other things, the direct involvement of waste pickers in plastics-related policymaking, as well as “universal registration” of waste pickers in local and national databases, so they can be enrolled in social benefits programs and more formally included in the plastics recycling value chain.
In order to create more programs like Ground Score, Cass Talbott says waste picker collectives around the world should cultivate relationships with policymakers inside local and regional governments, who can help educate their peers on the benefits waste pickers provide. Ground Score has one particularly strong connection within Portland’s Homelessness and Urban Camping Impact Reduction Program, which has helped Ground Score negotiate nearly all of its contracts with the city, according to Cass Talbott.
Waste pickers with the Nakuru County Waste Pickers Association in Kenya call for recognition and respect outside of a dump site in 2024. James Wakibia / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images via Grist
Waste pickers and their allies often talk about a “just transition” for the waste sector, a concept that seeks to resolve the apparent tension between reducing plastic production and protecting waste pickers’ livelihoods: If oil and gas companies stop making so much plastic, waste pickers could have less work to do.
For their part, Ground Score’s employees and day workers are aware of that tension. Brown, at The People’s Depot, stresses that plastic production should be reduced and that companies should be “held accountable” for the waste they create. Detten, the GLITTER group member, says she wishes we could send a big laser up into space to “zap” away the world’s plastic pollution.
Christine Alix is more reserved than some of her co-workers. She has dark blue hair peeking out from under her baseball cap, and wears bright yellow sunglasses despite the overcast day. She says that, before she started waste picking, she would get angry with people for throwing plastic onto the street. Her feelings are more complicated now: “Thanks for giving me a job,” she jokes.
Alix says her bigger priority is trying to keep streets looking clean in order to “reduce the impacts of sweeps,” referring to the police clearing of tents and other shelters from parks, sidewalks, and other places.
Most of the team is effusive about Ground Score’s social mission and the way a simple, low-barrier job can change people’s trajectory. At least three people tell me Ground Score saved their life. Others say their work with the organization has given them a renewed sense of purpose and self-respect. “I love my job,” Detten says. “It’s fulfilling in a way that just expands my humanity.”
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