Charitable donation bins, the large steel and metal boxes often found in parking lots, began appearing in the U.S. in the 1950s. By 1960, Portland had more than 70 goodwill bins, collecting tens of thousands of bags of donated goods a year. But there is a cost that comes with charitable giving. New reporting from The Believer found more than 30 documented cases where people have died while trying to access donated goods. Many of the deceased were people experiencing homelessness, and the documented number of deaths is believed to be an undercount.
Paul Collins, an English professor at Portland State University, wrote about this issue for the publication. He joins us to share more about the people who have died because of these bins and why they are so deadly.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller, coming to you from the Gert Boyle Studio. Charitable donation bins, the large metal boxes often found in parking lots, began appearing in the U.S. in the 1950s. By 1960, Portland alone had more than 70 of these bins and amassed tens of thousands of bags of donated goods every year.
But there is a hidden cost to this charitable giving. New reporting from The Believer found dozens of cases where people died while trying to access donated goods, and there’s a good chance that number is an undercount.
Paul Collins is an English professor at Portland State University. His new article is called “The Death of a Superman.” He joins us now. It’s great to have you back on the show.
Paul Collins: Oh, thanks for having me here.
Miller: You start your story with a man named Christopher Dennis. Who was he?
Collins: So, yeah, Christopher Dennis is someone who’s, in a way, very recognizable. He was one of these guys who would kind of work the crowds in Hollywood in a superhero outfit – in his case, Superman. And one thing that was interesting about him is he’s perfect for the part. He’s like 6’ 5”. He had this uncanny resemblance to Christopher Reeve, but also – and this is not always the case in the sort of superhero gig – he was actually really, really into Superman. There’s a documentary that came out a couple of decades ago called “Confessions of a Superhero” that he’s in, and when you see his apartment in it, it’s floor-to-ceiling with Superman memorabilia. So he really kind of lived the role.
Miller: The title of the story obviously talks about the death of a Superman. How much were you able to learn about how this man, Christopher Dennis, died?
Collins: By 2019, he had fallen on pretty hard times. He struggled with meth addiction for many years, and his health was in pretty rough shape. He was homeless. And what happened with Dennis was he basically went kind of bin diving one night in Van Nuys in this bin that was kind of next to a bank parking lot, pretty quiet during the night.
Around 11 o’clock at night, he basically tried climbing into the bin to take stuff from the bin. And the door of the bin closed on him. He seems to have lost his grip in keeping the door open and it strangled him. The full details of that are in the LA County autopsy report. So hearing about that case and looking at that report was kind of one of the big starting points for me working on this.
Miller: Let’s take a little bit of a historical detour, which you provide in the piece. You write that before there were donation bins, there were ragmen. What did they do?
Collins: These were guys that went around, usually with sort of handcarts. Occasionally, they’d have a horse and they would go house to house collecting old rags, basically the stuff that would go into a bin now, potentially. Clothing that was just no longer wanted or had been outgrown. So that was in the late 1800s, early 1900s. That was how people would get rid of that stuff.
Miller: What happened to ragmen?
Collins: Well, what happened was in some ways kind of a classic story which is twofold. A number of cities started passing ordinances, more or less banning them. And it should be pointed out – and this is maybe not altogether surprising – there seems to have been an element of bigotry to this. A lot of the ragmen were Jewish, so it seems to have been targeting them.
But the other thing that started happening right around the same time, and it’s this kind of confluence of these things with technology, is that more overtly Christian organizations started stepping in. And they had trucks.
Miller: As opposed to carts?
Collins: Right. So they could really operate kind of at scale. They really ramped up the amount of stuff they could pick up.
They’re not a Christian organization now, but they were when they started. One thing that maybe older listeners would actually still remember is that it used to be that Goodwill would send trucks – lots of trucks. They would do pickups at your house on a regular basis. You would have a Goodwill bag in your house, and the driver would come by. They’d not only pick up the stuff, they would kind of sort it, too. If they didn’t need something, they would tell you. But by the mid-century, that kind of started to shift.
Miller: So to go back to the danger of these bins, you heard about this man, Christopher Dennis. How did you go about trying to piece together how many other people have died in these bins over the years?
Collins: It was surprisingly difficult. And one of the reasons for that is that it is not something that is tracked nationally in any way, and it’s not even necessarily tracked in a local fashion. So when I first started looking into this, what I kept finding were lots and lots of local news stories of someone getting trapped and dying in these bins. And it was always treated as kind of a one-off, freak accident. But when you see dozens of them, you start thinking, well, this is not a freak accident anymore.
It was interesting. When I first started on this, I actually talked with a retired county medical director. And she said, one thing you got to be careful of is that in the autopsies, and particularly death certificates, they’re not gonna say “asphyxia from a donation bin,” they’re just gonna say “asphyxia,” or maybe a “mechanical asphyxia” or something like that. So, it’s very difficult to narrow down, particularly with some of the record keeping systems around, to figure out where these things are happening.
So, a lot of it actually was initially just from news reports that I was finding. And then some of it was going to cities and seeing if they had any way of keeping track. Most of them didn’t, but a couple of them actually did.
Miller: So that’s helpful caveats for why I said in my intro that it seems like what you were able to piece together almost assuredly is an undercount. But how many deaths were you able to find directly attributed in the U.S. in recent years to these bins?
Collins: Thirty-one in the U.S. alone. I should add there’s actually been a number of other countries and really crucially Canada, because they’re kind of an important part of the story as it turns out. But also, there have been deaths in England and Australia. And that was just me looking at English language media. I also actually found accounts of this happening in Iceland and Italy.
In the U.S. alone, it was 31. And it’s almost certainly more, because when I went to, for instance, Los Angeles and San Diego, both did have the ability to search through their records to specifically look for donation bins. It just comes down to the software they’re using and whether it has a search field for stuff like that. And when I asked for their records on this, they not only found cases that I knew they would find because they’ve been reported, they found more cases where there had been no reporting on it. So to me, that indicated that there’s more out there that we don’t even know about.
Miller: What makes these bins so deadly?
Collins: Well, basically what happened was, starting a few decades ago, bins used to generally have a very simple design. I mean, in a way, they were kind of a glorified trash can. It was a bin with a lid on it, and maybe a flap or just an open hole, and you would just toss your things into it. And starting a few decades ago, you start seeing bins, or at least some of them, having anti-theft doors. And there’s kind of two main designs for that that have been identified. One is kind of a mailbox chute style, kind of like the old blue postal service boxes you’d see in the street. And then the other is what’s called a roll-up bin, which is where you open the door, and it’s usually very kind of heavily weighted. And there’s like a drawer or kind of a receptacle in it that doesn’t drop the item down into the bin until you’ve closed the door all the way.
What happens is people will kind of hold these open while they’re crawling inside, basically upside down, to grab stuff out. And if they lose their grip on the bin or on the door while they’re kind of finessing this, it will then close in on either their chest or their neck. And there’s all kinds of issues that that can cause, obviously, a number of people have suffocated from that. You can die from compression of the chest. There’s even been deaths in some cases just from exposure because people were stuck. So that’s the issue that’s come about from that.
Miller: You talked about Canada and I want to turn there now. What happened in Canada after a series of very publicly reported donation bin deaths happened?
Collins: Canada basically had the same problem that this country had, where people kept dying in these bins. But one thing that happened there is that they had a whole series of them. They had like six deaths, basically within a period of about as many months. And when the first one or two happened, there was actually one person in particular in Vancouver, British Columbia that really pointed out that there had also been prior deaths in previous years. And I think that maybe I have started to get some people looked at it a little more, but not a lot happened initially.
Then there was another and another and another, and it got to the point where there was starting to be a real outcry. This is in early 2019, where there was a real outcry over it, and people started saying, we need to have these bins have a safer design. And city councils and various cities up there kind of hemmed and hawed about it.
Then literally like a week or two later, there was another one. It was someone named Crystal Papineau in Toronto who was a pretty prominent and vocal advocate for the homeless. That’s when it really became untenable. And there was a real outcry at that point.
Miller: And what happened?
Collins: Well, I mean, this is the good news. I know this is a pretty grim story in a lot of ways, but they fixed it. Basically, in Vancouver, Toronto and a number of other cities in Canada, they passed ordinances that required the design of the bin be certified as safe by an engineer, among other things. They also have to list who the owner is. It has to have liability insurance on it. It has to have a permit. But none of it’s particularly complicated…
Miller: And you note that after those physical changes, there have been no deaths in donation bins in Canada.
Collins: Yeah, that’s right. It worked.
Miller: The horror of the deaths is the most salient present part of your recent essay, but maybe to me the biggest surprise was that many of these bins are not actually connected to charitable organizations. What were you able to learn about who put these bins in parking lots all over the place and who has access to them?
Collins: Yeah, that was surprising. It’s a real wild west kind of setup. So, many, many cities have little or no regulation over donation bins. That’s essentially the case here in Portland. I checked with the city and I said, if I want to put a donation bin in my parking lot, what do I have to do? And they said, well, it can’t be taller than 10 feet. It can’t be over 200 square feet. It’s basically…
Miller: A zoning thing. It can’t be a new building, but anybody could put anything anywhere they want?
Collins: I could just put up a bin and label it, donate stuff for Paul. I mean, you could do that.
Miller: Or donate stuff for people in need.
Collins: Yes, I mean, preferably, but…
Miller: You could write that, but you don’t actually have to do that.
Collins: That’s right. Yeah, there’s no way really of knowing in a lot of those situations. People, I think, will just naturally assume it’s for charity, but there’s very little control over that. I should say too that Portland is not unusual in that regard. That’s most cities. Most cities don’t have regulations on this stuff.
Miller: So then, who would even be on the hook for making these changes if these changes, the physical changes to make them safer, were even required?
Collins: Well, that’s a good question. I think in most cases, it would at least initially probably come down to cities. That’s actually what’s happening up in Canada, which is cities started passing ordinances around this. I think now in Alberta, for instance, they’re looking at doing a province-wide law and I think there’s movement towards maybe something national happening there. My guess is that might be the pattern that maybe hopefully would emerge in this country, too.
Miller: Paul, thanks very much.
Collins: Oh, thank you.
Miller: Paul Collins is a professor of English at Portland State University. His recent piece in The Believer is about people dying after getting stuck in donation bins.
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