OPINION | Trash is infrastructural, but it’s also personal. It connects us in on a human level.
With his woven blanket attached like a cape, Lor wandered around a camp with a garbage bag attached to his waist. He dipped down repeatedly to pluck litter with his blue-gloved hand. He was one of a three-person Ground Score crew lugging out thousands of pounds of trash from Old Town.
“Trash” has become shorthand for a downtown in peril by elected officials and media outlets. It’s a frequent and heated talking point for Mayor Ted Wheeler, who charged former Mayor Sam Adams with the focus of cleaning up the city.
What gets lost is that trash is at once infrastructural and personal — and both issues are front and center for Ground Score Association, a peer-run waste workers organization.
After all, as Lor points out, garbage trucks don’t visit camps every two weeks as they do with home addresses. That’s an infrastructural problem. People “don’t have the means to get a lot of trash picked up and moved from the common area, which is why I love what Ground Score does,” Lor said.
This past February, Ground Score launched G.L.I.T.T.E.R. (Ground Score Leading Inclusively Together Through Environmental Recovery) as a city-contracted program that employs people experiencing homelessness or housing insecurity to clean up areas of the city where people are sleeping outside. They are a “doorstep waste collection service,” as Barbie Weber, co-founder and coordinator of Ground Score for houseless residents in Old Town, Downtown, the Lloyd District and Central Eastside.
When Lor speaks of trash, he speaks of connection — how Portland is a “river community,” so we need to think of the ocean. How we are connected as people, so it’s “important that we nurture solidarity and community and the old ways of doing things — whether it’s asking your neighbor, whether it’s someone two floors up in your apartment, or the mansion next door, or the tent next door — for what you need.”
Trash does connect us, and it’s all deeply human. It is how we shed our days. It’s what we touch, consume and reject.
Barbie sees trash as an issue of human health. Campers, particularly those with mobility issues, who breathe in the grime of the daily life in the city, can’t get up and sweep around their tent or haul garbage. “We do that for them,” she said.
She explains that there are health impacts on people’s lungs.
“When people camp on the sidewalk, there’s this grime. Cigarette butts, little pieces of paper, dirt and dust will completely surround their tent. It’s very very nasty stuff, especially when it rains. Then it’s like oil and grease and muck,” Barbie said. “It gets everywhere. Unless you are like Johnny-on-the-spot sweeping every time. Sometimes it’s this thick around someone’s tent who hasn’t moved in a while,” Barbie said, holding her fingers 4 inches apart. “It’s going in their bedding.
“Sanitation service should be a personal right. There should never be a day where someone (is) feeling like they have to sleep in a pile of trash because they have no where to take it,” she said, gesturing toward a camp near Northwest First Avenue and Flanders Street, which the Ground Score crew just tidied: “You see this is clean and people are living more comfortably and in a more humane way — with dignity.”
Street Roots has close connections with Ground Score. We both focus on low-barrier jobs that can draw from people’s expertise and experiences. While Ground Score focuses on waste management, Street Roots focuses on media. Ground Score co-founder and coordinator Barbie Weber was also a Street Roots vendor, and many vendors are also Ground Score workers.
STREET ROOTS NEWS: Ground Score puts homeless Portlanders to work for a fair wage
Barbie and other Ground Score workers have an expertise in how waste impacts campers and how to interact with campers to respectfully support their waste management. It is this expertise that they bring to more frequent city contracts, as well as when they are hired to support SOLVE volunteer crews.
They interact with awareness of people’s trauma, and their work ranks are permeable: Campers can easily become workers, and workers, the aim is, can move up the ranks of Ground Score, from the informal work of waste picking (done by millions globally) to higher-paying and more secure jobs.
“Some people want to do everything,” Barbie said of campers. “They start running the trash crew.” Barbie laughs and claps her hands. “Yes! This is what it’s about. You tell us what to do.”
Kaia Sand is the executive director of Street Roots. You can reach her at kaia@streetroots.org. Follow her on Twitter @mkaiasand.
Street Roots is an award-winning weekly publication focusing on economic, environmental and social justice issues. The newspaper is sold in Portland, Oregon, by people experiencing homelessness and/or extreme poverty as means of earning an income with dignity. Street Roots newspaper operates independently of Street Roots advocacy and is a part of the Street Roots organization. Learn more about Street Roots. Support your community newspaper by making a one-time or recurring gift today.
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