Despite public perception, Metro data shows housed residents are responsible for most waste dumped on public property
“Trash tells a story,” Stephanie Rawson said.
While the general public may not see abandoned garbage as an archeological site, Rawson, Metro community stewardship manager, reads roadside piles of waste and interprets them for a living.
Stories in the news of garbage proliferating around homeless camps are not uncommon in Portland, particularly after COVID-19 wreaked havoc on services, generating a public perception that homeless populations are responsible for the city’s blight. Despite the anecdotes, Metro data does not align with common assumptions of where the vast majority of the city’s trash comes from.
“There are many misconceptions about garbage, including the association between dumped garbage and people surviving outdoors,” Rawson said. “Our data shows that people living in residences dump garbage in public spaces more frequently than people who are surviving outdoors.”
The most up-to-date data from the Metro RID dashboard shows Metro RID, which stands for Regional Illegal Dumping, and its partners cleaned more than twice as much dumped residential waste as it did waste from homeless Portlanders in the last year. The Metro RID Patrol provides cleanup services for abandoned trash on public property and partners with local governments and nonprofit organizations to clean up garbage, litter and graffiti across the Portland metro, according to Rawson.
“Our data shows that people living in residences dump garbage in public spaces more frequently than people who are surviving outdoors.”
— Stephanie Rawson, Metro community stewardship manager
Whether construction debris, boats on the river or littered parks, RID Patrol responds to reports of abandoned trash in public spaces and tracks improvements through an iPad app at each location.
As COVID-19 disrupted myriad systems and exacerbated Portland’s homelessness crisis, the nature of the reports Metro received from housed neighbors started to change, according to Rawson.
“It became very fear-based,” Rawson said. “Some of the comments that came along with the reports helped us realize they're not actually reporting about the trash. They're reporting about the individual or individuals that might be in that area.”
The individuals neighbors complained about were not necessarily responsible for the trash itself. Unsheltered sites accounted for 26% of waste Metro cleared from public property in the past year, according to RID data. The same data shows residential dumping accounts for 59% of all sites cleaned by Metro and its partners in the past year.
Even the proximity of trash to homeless encampments is a poor indicator of the source of that trash, according to RID.
Barbra Weber, Ground Score co-founder and co-executive director, said it is not uncommon to see housed Portlanders or construction crews leave trash near encampments, including a recent instance of an apartment building renovation crew repeatedly dumping debris around an RV encampment Ground Score serves.
Weber said it’s unfair to assume a person living in a tent within the vicinity of a pile of trash is responsible for the trash in the first place. Resourceful people often take goods from illegally dumped piles, colloquially known as “free piles,” to take back to a site, but a homeless Portlander is not typically the source of most trash. Furniture, couches and tires are the items most consistently removed by RID Patrol, according to RID data.
“A lot of this trash isn't theirs, and they get blamed for all of it,” Weber said.
Based on conversations with homeless Portlanders, RID Patrol said it is common for them to experience people dumping garbage and other hard-to-dispose items in the area where they are surviving outdoors, according to Rawson.
“This may be the result of people attempting to pass their unwanted items onto others or to disguise it in an area where other items have been left,” she said.
Regardless, the perception that homeless Portlanders are particularly responsible for the city’s litter woes proliferates even into recent city homelessness policies, as does the idea that proximity establishes responsibility.
The city’s so-called daytime camping ban went into effect July 7, and expressly prohibits placing or storing “personal belongings, or other objects, in a total area encompassing more than ten square feet outside the tent or readily portable shelter,” and “the accumulation or leaving behind garbage, debris, unsanitary hazardous materials, sewage, or drug paraphernalia.”
As both data and experts on the ground tell it, the sources of “personal belongings or other objects” and “garbage, debris, unsanitary hazardous materials, sewage, or drug paraphernalia” near the city’s homeless encampments can’t be determined simply by proximity.
Mayor Ted Wheeler’s office declined to provide specific policies or procedures preventing Homelessness and Urban Camping Impact Reduction Team, or HUCIRP, staff or police from enforcing this portion of the ban on encampments within the vicinity of abandoned residential or construction trash. HUCIRP staff only agreed to speak with Street Roots off the record, and Cody Bowman, Wheeler’s communications director, simply sent a link to HUCIRP policy outlining what factors necessitate a camp removal.
“IRP contractors will continue to adhere to the campsite removal policy shared above,” Bowman said.
For Weber, her work remains the same.
“There's already been a considerable amount of sweeping across the city,” she said. “We've already kind of transitioned to providing service to specifically human beings and doesn't necessarily mean that they need a tent. We're just providing waste services for folks that are living outside.”
Filling the gaps
Weber knows about what it’s like to live outside. She also knows about trash.
“I'm kind of a trash expert,” Weber said.
She became homeless in 2012 after a traumatic brain injury affected her verbal and written communication abilities. A marketing manager by trade, Weber excelled at writing, but the challenge of her altered verbal and written communication abilities immediately threw her and her husband into housing insecurity, she said. After a few years, she started picking up trash in the vicinity of where she lived in a tent in 2018.
Through the community-led organization Trash for Peace, Weber created the Ground Score program, an association of informal waste management and environmental workers who provide tentside trash services in Portland, in 2019.
The program grew, branching into various programs with attention to the recycling needs of homeless Portlanders. The Ground Score Leading Inclusivity Together Through Environmental Recovery, or G.L.I.T.T.E.R. program, started as a partnership with HUCIRP, in an effort to help reduce the impact of homelessness on city and ODOT-owned spaces.
Weber recognized the almost complete lack of trash service at homeless Portlanders’ disposal, and the service gained immediate popularity.
“A lot of campers, because they had the opportunity to get rid of their garbage, would do it on their own time,” Weber said.
G.L.I.T.T.E.R. covers everything from the Peninsula Crossing to Holgate and the multi-use path at I-205. At times, workers have done outreach as far east as Troutdale and regularly cover the central city, where Ground Score’s headquarters are located. They cover 24 waste collection routes across the county by foot, bike or truck.
In 2022, Metro’s RID Patrol partnered with G.L.I.T.T.E.R. to launch the Camp Steward pilot program to provide garbage collection services to homeless Portlanders. From January to July 2022, Ground Score programs removed over a million pounds of trash. RID Patrol has collected 852 tons of waste over the last year.
“We went out, and we made relationships with the campers,” Weber said. “We would provide them bags, we would ask them to fill those bags with the garbage, and then we come back and get it.”
Weber said G.L.I.T.T.E.R. was able to offer a small stipend to people living in camps to clean the areas where they were living. Building symbiotic relationships with the community showed success, as people living without an address are not eligible for pickup on common Metro routes.
Rawson said services like the Metro bag program and G.L.I.T.T.E.R.’s tentside pickup fill a distinct need where there was previously no other option. Metro is currently reexamining the G.L.I.T.T.E.R. partnership, and Weber believes the program can show even more success in the future after an admittedly rocky start.
Trash for Peace partnered with the Metro RID program to develop the Camp Steward Program in 2022 after a one-time $10 million grant from the State of Oregon. Multnomah County’s Joint Office of Homeless Services also partners with Trash for Peace and other local organizations like Central City Concern and East Portland’s Cultivate Initiatives.
“To me, I'm a collaborator,” Weber said. “You want to collaborate? Find somebody — let's go collaborate with these people out there. I really believe in more of the movement.”
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