Bottle redemption center at Everyone Village helps residents, gleaners alike 

Laura Hart reaches both of her hands into a kiddie pool filled with recyclable bottles and cans. She grabs them, two at a time, and tosses them into a trash can next to her. 

Hart counts in her head, and although her lips move occasionally, she makes no sound. When she has counted all the cans immediately in front of her, she quickly spins the kiddie pool to bring more cans within her reach.

Don’t try to talk to her. That will wreck her rhythm — and her concentration. She’ll be happy to chat after she’s done counting, she said. 

Every time she hits 100, she turns to a table behind her and marks a yellow stickie note.

How fast is she? She can tally 100 cans in 41.5 seconds.

That speed — and accuracy — has earned Hart, a 54-year-old resident of Everyone Village, a following among the people who come to redeem bottles and cans at the transitional housing community at 3825 Janisse Street in West Eugene. Two years ago, with a grant from the Oregon Beverage Recycling Cooperative (OBRC), the community opened an alternative redemption center in its parking lot.

“Partnering with Everyone Village brings community benefits including workforce training and income-earning opportunities for Villagers,” Hillary Barbour, director of community and stakeholder engagement for OBRC, wrote in an email to Lookout Eugene-Springfield. “It also increases container return access and convenience for Eugene-based Oregonians.”

“I love it,” Hart said of the work. And her co-workers tease her about the customers who go only to her. Those co-workers say they frequently hear this refrain: “Can I have Laura count?” 

A growing operation

Starting last week, Everyone Village location expanded its days. It’s now open 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., Monday through Thursday. Up until last week, the bottle drop operated only three days per week — Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday — but that made it difficult for employees to seek other jobs. Now they have three days off in a row, Friday through Sunday. 

The extra day also helps serve the community of gleaners and canners who have come to rely on the location. If they’ve been collecting cans over the weekend, they’re happy to unload them on a Monday. 

More important, customers like it for redeeming large orders: At Everyone Village, there’s no limit to the numbers of cans and bottles that can be turned in at a single time. 

That benefits people who collect cans for a living, many of them unhoused, who have grown accustomed to the toil of lugging large bags of cans around with them. At BottleDrop centers in Eugene, the limit is 350 containers per person, per day, for $35. 

Another advantage of the Everyone Village location: Workers like Hart, who count by hand, process containers faster than machines do. As she counts, her coworkers take the garbage cans filled with bottles, separate out the glass, and feed the rest into two reverse vending machines inside an Everyone Village building. The vending machines crush the plastic and aluminum, which is stored in a shed until OBRC picks them up for transport to its plant.

Customers then take their stickie note with the final bottle tally to Dolores, an Everyone Village resident who gives them the cash they’re owed. 

On March 28, several customers with large orders pulled up. One was a pickup truck with six giant plastic bags, filled with bottles, in the bed. 

A separate gleaner, who asked not to be named, said she comes every other week on a day off from her job. She redeems about 2,000 bottles every time she comes, for $200. Previously, that would have required six trips to the closest BottleDrop Center on West Broadway, between McKinley and Garfield. 

The gleaner, who takes care of her parents with health problems and has a 19-year-old daughter, uses the proceeds to pay for her family’s food, gas, and car repairs. 

A win-win 

For the eight or so residents of Everyone Village who are employed at the bottle drop (others keep the job after they move to permanent housing), it’s decent work: They live in the village, so they don’t have to commute. They earn $15 per hour for about 14 hours a week. And they develop skills. 

“There’s customer service, there’s inventory, there’s heavy machinery,” said Mikki Washburn, the OBRC program director on site at Everyone Village. “All these skills that, yeah, [you] may not put a lot of thought into, but are very important for going out and finding new employment in the workforce.” 

Gabe Piechowicz, the founder and executive director of Everyone Village, calls it a “game-changer,” for residents and people who use the site. “Our community is changing as our neighborhood has a safe and convenient location to recycle,” he wrote in an email to Lookout Eugene-Springfield. 

The only downside?

Not too many people know about it, even after two years.

Washburn monitors Facebook Marketplace, and when she sees Springfield and Eugene residents offering large quantities of cans for sale, she’ll message them and tell them they can redeem at Everyone Village. 

“With the canners and gleaners, most of that is word of mouth,” Washburn said, “but the rest of Lane County, it has to be social media.” 

In the summer, as bottle collection and redemption grows in the nice weather, Everyone Village is hoping to develop a mobile bottle drop system, so customers who are unable to make it to the location can take advantage of their unlimited capacity, Washburn said. 

OBRC leaders plan to keep supporting the program as it grows. It takes strain off the closest BottleDrop Center on Broadway. And Barbour said OBRC is happy to have played some small role in the success of residents who leave Everyone Village. In the two years, three of the employees have graduated to permanent housing.