lansbury

Few weeks back we noticed a couple of bags of empty soda cans had gone missing from alongside our garden shed. We save the cans up from ourselves and other people, bag them and take them to the bottle recycling center and get 5 cents for each one. 10c starting April 1st. The money goes into the account of a local non profit. More concerned about someone walking around the property at night I put up CCTV camera. Last Monday I saw it recorded something around 3.30am, and find it captured same guy coming onto the property and taking 2 more bags of cans. He was driving a Dodge minivan with a distinctive roof rack and sign on the drivers door. Video to police so they know he is out and about, and I fit a wireless motion detector covering the front drive.

We left the last 2 bags of cans in place and at 1:29am this morning the motion detector goes off. Look out of window and there is the minivan. I was already on the phone to our dispatch center while the guy is still carrying the bags down our drive. We live at the end of a cul-de-sac 3 blocks long and forming a "Z" shape but all at right angles. He stopped outside a neighbors house and walked up their drive then got back in his minivan and drove off. I could see his lights and saw him get to the end of the cul-de-sac and turn onto the road it joins. At which point he got hardly any further before meeting the local constabulary.

One to Gene Genie.

Giantaxe

I live in an urban area and cans get removed from the recycling bin within minutes of it being put on the sidewalk the evening before collection day. Nominally illegal, but given that no one is coming on the property as with your situation, I don't complain.

dc koop

Hardly worth risking arrest for. A very large trash bag full of cans will probably fetch no more than 8 dollars. There used to be a recycling center beside a food market in downtown which was a hangout for shabbily dressed people on bikes who seemed to spend a lot of time shouting and swearing at each other.
It's a fair guess then that 8 dollars would get a bottle of Thunderbird

FinnDiego

Ditto, and likewise I don't really care once I've put the recycling bin out. I've had some issues with people coming to my yard to empty out the bin which is Not Cool in my book. That seems to have stopped now that I'm more regularly parking my car on the driveway which makes access trickier and the bins less visible from the street. Or they may have been scared away by my neighbor who likes to keep an eye on everything going around in the neighborhood...

mrken30

This is one of the issues of the Oregon deposit scheme. Similar thing has happened to work colleagues and neighbors. The work colleague in Portland has many homeless people trespassing. At 10c a can this will probably get worse. We throw our cans in the garbage now to stop this. I see many people on nextdoor complaining about this. Some single women get quite concerned when men pull up in vans and go down the side of the house.

The maximum here is 144 at one time, thats $14.40. When i did do the bottle can return , there were a fair number of people doing the full amount.