Oregon has the highest rate of chronic homelessness in the country. For Portlanders, the reason was clear. From 2020 to 2022 we saw rent increase by 42%, our city was rated the 4th fastest gentrifying city in the nation, and low-income housing began to disappear. The rising population of our neighbors living unsheltered had a clear root; housing. Simultaneously, plastic manufacturing has created a crisis. As a country, we add a football stadium worth of plastic to the landfill every 15 hours. The role plastic has in the climate crisis is largely determined by how we manage it. The OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) calculates that this year, waste plastic will release 200 million tons of carbon (more than three times Oregon’s annual carbon emissions) from its end of life. This shows us that how plastic is managed after its production matters. If we ship, landfill, mismanage, and incinerate plastics across the world, not only does this pose environmental challenges but these processes also generate and release carbon into the atmosphere.

Three years ago, we started to go to companies in Portland and inquire about where their garbage was going. We went to The Portland Traffic Supply Company, to the Vancouver Mall, to a grocery store, and to a plastic manufacturer. The Traffic company had boxes and boxes of big plastic spacers that held their sign poles in place. A clothing store in the Vancouver Mall received each garment wrapped in plastic bag after plastic bag. The grocery store started receiving plastic boxes of produce instead of cardboard boxes, and the plastic parts manufacturers generated huge amounts of ground plastics and parts that weren’t up to standard. Each company generates a different kind of plastic - what do they all have in common? None of them were recyclable.

Perfectly clean plastic isn’t recyclable.

We learned that even the companies want to recycle but they can’t. If recycling is limited to recreating consumer plastics the majority of plastic will be treated like trash. Only 8.5% of plastic is recycled and that has remained the same even as plastic production has doubled in the last two decades.

As Graham Forbes, a Plastics Leader at Greenpeace said:

“Not only are plastics killing marine animals, endangering our health, and creating a global pollution crisis, they are contributing to catastrophic climate change.”

There needs to be a new avenue that can recycle plastic into a new creation instead of a replication of the original virgin product.

When we study housing and houselessness across America we begin to see patterns. Cities with significant poverty rates, such as Detroit and Philadelphia, exhibit comparatively lower rates of houselessness nationwide, whereas wealthy cities like San Francisco and Seattle grapple with some of the highest rates of houselessness. Conversely, states that record the highest rates of drug overdose deaths like West Virginia, harbor relatively smaller homeless populations compared to other regions across the country. This aligns exactly with the statistics of our state.

Oregon is not one of the top states in terms of substance abuse. Oregon is also not in the top ten when it comes to individuals unable to receive Mental Health Care Services. And yet Oregon is at the very top when it comes to chronic homelessness and families living unsheltered. These statistics show us that across America, houselessness always comes back to the issue of housing itself. We’ve seen the widespread construction of apartment complexes, split-lot homes, and neighborhood gentrification; we've also seen a decline in low-income developments. Housing expenses are outpacing income growth. Within five years the average rent has increased 40%. Research indicates that a mere 10% uptick in rental costs correlates with a 13% surge in homelessness.