This petition, sponsored by DonateOakland.org, encourages the Oakland City Council to vote, on February 3, for a total ban on unattended collection bins.  Simultaneously, it expresses our disappointment with City Hall for their decision to water down a proposed ordinance in order to minimize the possibility of a lawsuit.

Who are the bin operators that City Hall is trying to accommodate?

Campus California (which has just rebranded itself as Recycle for Change) is just about the worst excuse for a non-profit imaginable. (See Matt Smith’s article in SF Weekly: Your Rags to Their Riches). Last year, they made $3 million and roughly one quarter million of that came from collection boxes in Oakland. They paid a $25 a nonprofit registration fee and zilch otherwise.

USAgain is the Wal-Mart of the collection bin industry. Based in Chicago, they are a for profit business with 14,000 bins in 19 states. Like Campus California, they pay no sales taxes and their Oakland business taxes for last year were likely less than what they spent for either of two 1/4 page ads in the local press.

Discover Books is the reincarnation of Thrift Recycling Management which employed bright blue boxes emblazoned “Books for Charity” in giant letters. The year they arrived in Oakland, they grossed $27 million and were the largest online book dealer in the world. They weren’t registered in the City of Oakland and paid no taxes.

Reuse Clothes & Shoes is a secretive Illinois-based business with virtually no online presence. How unscrupulous are they? When a San Pablo business owner found one of their bins dropped without permission on his property, he called and threatened to haul it to a salvage yard and sell it for scrap. Reuse Clothes and Shoes responded by removing the steel bin and replacing it with a plastic one. Their bin labeling lists them as an Oakland company but they aren’t even registered to do business here.

What do they all have in common?

• None are based in Oakland - nor do they have real ties to the community.

• None of the goods they collect (clothes, shoes, books, household accessories) stays in Oakland where it would be available for purchase by residents on limited incomes.

• None of those goods go to legitimate Oakland nonprofits that depend on donations of salvageable goods to provide incredibly valuable services.

• None of the profits from the sale of those goods are plowed back into the local economy.

• They pay no sales taxes and virtually no Oakland business taxes.
• Their bins are a magnet for graffiti and illegal dumping and most are concentrated in East Oakland and other lower-income, minority neighborhoods that are most in need of improvement.

What do the clothing collection bins, in particular, have in common?

The operators all claim to be saving the environment by keeping textiles out of the waste stream and by reducing carbon emissions one t-shirt at a time.

What they don’t tell you is that those t-shirts are compacted into huge bales that are shipped by diesel trucks to ports in Los Angeles and Texas where they are, in turn, loaded onto bunker-oil powered cargo ships that sail as far as West Africa where the clothing is resold at market prices. The total distance traveled: up to 8,000 miles. How about that carbon footprint?

They also don’t tell you that the textiles exported from Europe and the USA to West Africa and elsewhere have severely decimated domestic textile manufacturing with a reduction in employment levels by up to 80% or more.

What can you do to help?

• Sign our petition for which we’ll say “thank-you”.

• Share our petition for which we’ll say “thank-you” and give you a virtual hug which is the next-best thing.

• Attend the council meeting Tuesday night and/or send emails for which the council members will thank you for being concerned about Oakland’s present and future.

• Visit and bookmark our DonateOakland.org website for which you’ll say “thank-you” to us.

• Remember that you do have other local options.  Support the 14 Oakland non-profits listed on our website that welcome your donations of clothes, shoes, furniture and household goods.