Volunteers address abandoned shopping carts as retailers, Kitsap County work on solution

Peiyu Lin
Kitsap Sun
Volunteer Jennifer Ashmore wipes a shopping cart found on Silverdale Way in a clean-up event on Oct. 29. Volunteers returned abandoned shopping carts to the stores they belonged to.

Orange for Home Depot, black for Safeway, red for Target, blue for Goodwill and green for Joann.

Volunteers who have been collecting abandoned shopping carts in forests, along trails and in parks in Kitsap County have become familiar with the color scheme and what cart belongs to which store.

As the homelessness crisis continues in Kitsap County, those who work to keep forested areas clear for public use are finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with the number of discarded carts.

"It's getting worse," said Mary Earl, director for the Clear Creek Trail Task Force, whose volunteer members clean up the trails. 

On the Clear Creek Trail, carts are a common sight: in the brush and on the trail. Earl even found an abandoned Dollar Tree cart in the Clear Creek recently, with incoming salmon navigating around it. 

The contents of the carts recently collected by volunteers varied: from fresh food to cut logs, personal items to trash.

Earl said she takes the carts she collects to the nearest store. The number of carts to be returned is so high she doesn't even care if it's the store where the cart belongs. She said she thinks businesses should take care of their property and be part of the efforts to clean up the streets of Silverdale, Earl said.

While community members have been volunteering to retrieve the carts, the county is evaluating possible solutions for the issue in the long term, one county official said.

Retailers' role in preventing cart theft

Stores are aware of the problem of shopping carts disappearing, said Target spokesperson Brian Harper-Tibaldo.

To address the issue, Target hires a vendor to collect its shopping carts and send them back to their stores, Harper-Tibaldo said. 

In some Target locations, where the theft of carts is a severe problem, the company uses the "Gatekeeper" cart system. The system uses self-locking "smart wheels" with a radio frequency-enabled perimeter antenna to limit the distance carts can be moved from the store. 

But, the company doesn't consider its Silverdale location at 3201 NW Randall Way as a location that needs the locking device system. The company retrieves most of its shopping carts with the vendor's help, Harper-Tibaldo said.

Katie Walters, a Kitsap County commissioner candidate, left, and David Emmons, Greater Kitsap Chamber president, right, load about 11 shopping carts onto a truck. Volunteers returned shopping carts found abandoned on the Clear Creek Trail and Silverdale Way back to businesses in Silverdale on Oct. 29.

What can the county do?

Kitsap County does not have a specific program for retrieving carts and instead assists various community groups working to collect the carts from public property. 

The county is looking to other jurisdictions to explore possible solutions and is in the process of evaluating the best approaches for Kitsap County, said Kitsap County spokesman Doug Bear, but he described the issue as "a relatively new area across all jurisdictions."

One hurdle is figuring out who pays for the cost of returning the carts to stores, Bear said.

The city of Renton in 2016 passed an ordinance that allows the city to impound any lost, stolen or abandoned shopping cart found within the city. Owners of the impounded carts are informed and have 14 days to retrieve the carts. They are subject to $100 fine for each cart impounded by the city, according to the ordinance.

The Oregon-based Northwest Grocery Association, a lobbying organization for grocery stores, is working to extend its cart retrieval program, which works successfully in Oregon, to Washington state, said Melinda Merrill, of the association.

The cart retrieval program affixes a sticker with a QR code and a phone number on each shopping cart so that people can easily report abandoned carts by calling the number or scanning the QR code. NFM Cart Rescue, a company owned by the Northwest Grocery Association, runs the program. NFM is working on getting retailers to join the program and hiring staff to pick up the carts, Merrill said.

Retailers who use the service NFM provides will pay the cost, Merrill said. The company would also send staff to pick up the carts on a regular basis.

There hasn't been a specific timeline of when the program will start in Washington state or which retailers will participate, but the association is working on the details to run the program in Kitsap County, Merrill said.

"Kitsap is one of the communities we hope to roll it out," Merrill said. "It is on our radar screen and it is a priority for us."

Abandoned shopping carts are collected by volunteers in the Silverdale community.

Getting to the root of the problem

Bear said the problem of abandoned carts has "certainly" been exacerbated by the county's homeless issues.

Anton Preisinger, founder of Northwest Hospitality, leads volunteers in his organization in returning hundreds of shopping carts back to business owners when cleaning up encampments in Kitsap County.

While he said volunteers are happy to get the carts back to business owners, he said the bigger problem than abandoned carts is the shortage of affordable housing in Kitsap and the lack of resources to help the homeless people.

"Shopping carts would go away if we could house people," Preisinger said.

Reach breaking news reporter Peiyu Lin at pei-yu.lin@kitsapsun.com or on Twitter @peiyulintw.

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