MILWAUKIE, Ore. -- A new Oregon Bottle Drop center opens Thursday on Southeast King Road in Milwaukie. But not everyone is excited about what it means for nearby grocery stores who provide the same service.
Taking your bottles and cans back for money can be a frustrating, gross experience. The machines don't work, the nickel you get back isn't worth what it used to be and you're standing in sticky, filth like what we found at the Fred Meyer bottle return on Southeast 82nd and Foster.
"It's horrendous usually and quite dangerous actually," one man said. "I feel unsafe."
Boerge Pedersen lives nearby and says he puts all his cans and bottles in curbside recycling so he doesn't have to deal with grocery store bottle returns saying, "It's half empty bottles that spill, it smells."
Because of the negative experience, bottle returns in Oregon dropped to 64 percent in 2015. In the 1980s it was a 90-percent return rate. It's why lawmakers decided Oregon's bottle bill needed a change.
Forty-five new indoor, bottle drop redemption centers are going in across the state. Milwaukie is the newest and number 18 out of 45 locations.
"This is so much better, it's a clean, staffed and indoor environment," said Cherilyn Bertges of the Oregon Beverage Recycling Cooperative. "There are people there to help you all the time, brand new machines that are faster and newer. And you can put each type of container in the same machine."
Bertges explained that these centers are paid for by grocery chains and the beverage distribution industry -- not taxpayers. So stores nearby that take cans now won't be required to once one of these bottle drop locations open. Most, if not all 10 grocery stores around Milwaukie's new redemption center are stopping the service.
It's making an already hard life on the streets, even harder now that people will have to go farther.
"I come here everyday," said transient Josh Kechter of the Fred Meyer on Southeast 82nd. "It's not my only source of income picking up cans, but it's definitely important."
Fred Meyer didn't get back to us about whether their bottle return area on 82nd and Foster will take the state up on closing down. But if it does, Kechter says he'll have to walk at least two more miles to get his money at the new redemption center.
"People who don't depend on it, I'm sure they'll appreciate it because it'll be cleaner and it won't be a lot of the same traffic all the time. It won't be the same people taking the cans back for the drug money or what have you."
Starting in April, the deposit goes up to 10 cents. A bigger incentive to get your money back.