The BottleDrop redemption center at Portland’s Delta Park in North Portland is set to close Friday, leaving a very large gap in the city’s bottle and can redemption infrastructure.
In the past year, the Delta Park center processed about 68 million redeemable beverage containers and paid out nearly $7 million to the people returning them, according to Devon Horsfield, vice president of strategy and outreach for the Oregon Beverage Recycling Cooperative, which runs the state’s redemption program.
Starting Saturday, those containers – nearly a quarter of the bottles and cans redeemed in Portland – and the people relying on the cash payments they generated, will have to go somewhere else…