Ground Score sees its mission as building community while “changing society’s perceptions of what and who is considered valuable.” Brodie Cass Talbott

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.

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........

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