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Deck hand Trey Dennis guides the vacuum tube that sucks up trash from the surface of Buffalo Bayou on a new, 40-foot Bayou-Vac boat created to more efficiently get trash out of the bayou and prevent it from flowing into the Gulf of Mexico.
As plastic and styrofoam trash floats on top of organic matter, deck hand Trey Dennis guides a vacuum tube while boat captain Dave Rivers, also on the boat, operates its mechanical arm.
Plastic and Styrofoam trash floats on top of organic matter in Buffalo Bayou. The Buffalo Bayou Partnership sends a cleanup boat out six days a week to clear out trash that makes its way into the bayou from storm sewers. The trash is dropped in streets or tossed out of cars on roads and bridges. The partnership has an agreement with the Port of Houston for the longtime cleanup effort, called the Clean and Green Program.
Buffalo Bayou Partnership’s Clean and Green team captain Dave Rivers shows off the new, 40-foot barge dubbed the "Bayou-Vac” for its work cleaning trash out of Buffalo Bayou.
Buffalo Bayou Partnership Clean and Green team captain Dave Rivers operates the Bayou-Vac boat and its mechanical arm as his boat partner Trey Dennis manipulates a long vacuum tube to clean trash from the surface of Buffalo Bayou.
The Buffalo Bayou Partnership Clean and Green team set 10 containment booms on Buffalo Bayou to corral trash so they can remove it with their new Bayou-Vac cleanup boat.
Trash gathers at the site of a construction barge on Buffalo Bayou. Buffalo Bayou Partnership’s Clean and Green Team will clean it all up, and return the next day to find more trash has accumulated.
Trash floats between two construction barges on Buffalo Bayou.
Trash gathers at the site of a construction barge on Buffalo Bayou. Buffalo Bayou Partnership’s Clean and Green Team will clean it all up, and return the next day to find more trash has accumulated. If it's not removed, the trash will float to the Port of Houston and on to Galveston Bay and the Gulf of Mexico.
Trash gathers at the site of a construction barge on Buffalo Bayou. Buffalo Bayou Partnership’s Clean and Green Team will clean it all up, and return the next day to find more trash has accumulated.
Trash gathers at the site of a construction barge on Buffalo Bayou. Buffalo Bayou Partnership’s Clean and Green Team will clean it all up, and return the next day to find more trash has accumulated.
Buffalo Bayou Partnership Clean and Green Team member Trey Dennis guides the vaccum hose to suck up trash from a containment boom on Buffalo Bayou.
Trash gathers at the site of a construction barge on Buffalo Bayou. Buffalo Bayou Partnership’s Clean and Green Team will clean it all up, and return the next day to find more trash has accumulated.
Buffalo Bayou Partnership’s Clean and Green Team and the new "Bayou-Vac,” a contraption on a pontoon boat that sucks trash out of the bayou, pulled over at Buffalo Bayou Canoe Launch.
A smaller Jon boat with Clean and Green Program workers speeds down Buffalo Bayou. Clean and Green has a staff of six, but they also use volunteer labor from people working off court-ordered community service.
Trash gathers at the site of a construction barge on Buffalo Bayou. Buffalo Bayou Partnership’s Clean and Green Team will clean it all up, and return the next day to find more trash has accumulated.
In blistering heat, Dave Rivers guides a 46-foot barge down Buffalo Bayou toward the Port of Houston, on the lookout for U-shaped containment booms filled with floating trash.
His deck-hand partner, Trey Dennis — whom Rivers has nicknamed “Country Slim” — is on the lower level, getting ready to operate a long vacuum tube with a 16-inch opening that will suck trash from the water's surface.
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In addition to driving the boat, Rivers is its resident storyteller, keeping everyone entertained with tales about alligators, a jackrabbit that treed a coachwhip snake, or his personal favorite, the day J.J. Watt filmed a commercial from the base of their boat, lifting a heavy basket from the muddy water. If a visitor seems skeptical, Rivers pulls out his cell phone to flip through hundreds of photos – his personal visual catalog of life and work on the bayou.
“We’re out here saving the world every day. It’s totally possible,” Rivers says as he approaches an acre-sized island of floating trash. “Sometimes it seems daunting because we clean it all up and come out the next day and there’s more. But after COVID, I realized that it’s possible. There was no trash (in the early days of the COVID shutdown), because nobody was littering. It’s totally controllable. All we have to do is change our habits.”
Rivers and Dennis are out on the Bayou-Vac boat, operated by Buffalo Bayou Partnership and its Clean and Green Program, funded by the Harris County Flood Control District and the Port of Houston to clean up the waterway.
Don't Mess With Texas: To report littering, go to dontmesswithtexas.org and report the license plate number, make and color of the vehicle, date, time, location and what was tossed. TXDOT will send the car owner a Don't Mess With Texas litter bag and a letter reminding them to keep trash off our roads. You can do it faster using the TXDOT "Litterer"
Texas bottle bill: for information on bottle bills in Texas, go to bottlebill.org.
Keep America Beautiful: for information on recycling and fighting littering nationally, go to kab.org
Keep Texas Beautiful: for information on recycling and highway, waterway and beach cleanup efforts in Texas, go to ktb.org.
Their work is smelly and messy, gathering floating trash from 10 containment booms scattered along 14 miles of Buffalo Bayou — the waterway that originally brought brothers Augustus and John Allen to found the city of Houston in 1836 — and a little bit of Brays Bayou.
Crews in smaller Jon boats do more hands-on work gathering trash by the bagful. The Clean & Green staff of six is supplemented by 100 or so “volunteers” doing court-ordered community service.
On the boat's top tier, Rivers works the hydraulic arm attached to the vacuum tube, while Dennis guides the tube over the water’s surface from the main deck, sucking up plastic, glass and Styrofoam bottles and cups, aluminum cans, food containers. There’s a basketball and a soccer ball, bright yellow-green tennis balls and a surprising number of golf balls, likely errant efforts from a nearby driving range, all afloat on a bed of organic matter — the leaves, twigs and stringy brown tassels that drop from oak trees.
There is no end to the litter that Rivers and Dennis and the other teams scoop up five days a week, all of which is drawn from 213 square miles of urban streets, and washed into storm sewers that drain into the bayous.
Every year, the Bayou-Vac and its crews collect about 2,000 cubic yards of trash — enough to fill 167 commercial dump trucks.
Without this work, that trash would instead travel through the bayous, the Port of Houston and into Galveston Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, compounding a growing problem of plastics in the oceans.
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The partnership’s newest Bayou-Vac launched into the water a month ago, though the cleanup program has been under way for about 20 years. Early on, they picked up litter the hard way, using small boats and crab nets.
Longtime board member Mike Garver, is 85 and sold his BRH Garver Construction company but still works in commercial real estate at Garver Real Estate. His work with Buffalo Bayou Partnership — and his role in keeping the bayous clean — has been a passion project for 35 years.
Back in 2008, he was visiting his daughter in Connecticut when he saw a big leaf vacuum truck sucking up piles of fallen leaves. He wondered: If they could suck up leaves with a vacuum tube, why couldn’t they do the same for trash on the surface of water?
Garver bought a used, 36-foot boat and created a vacuum unit with a flexible hose that could be manipulated to pick up trash. He spent about $75,000 out of his own pocket.
That first Bayou-Vac boat felt like a dream compared to the physicality of doing the work by hand, but it still wasn’t easy. The boat was adapted through the years, but offloading the wet, decomposing trash was always harder than gathering it.
With the original boat showing its age, Garver and the board decided it was time for an upgrade. Their new boat is bigger, holds more trash and uses rolling tracks to offload like a Dumpster being emptied by municipal garbage trucks, saving the crews an entire day each time they offload a container. This new one cost $200,000, and was paid for by the Kinder Foundation and partnership board member, Sis Johnson and her husband, Hasty.
As interesting as this new boat is, Garver and Buffalo Bayou Partnership workers are more interested in ways to reduce or stop the flow of litter.
“What we’re cleaning up is litter from off the streets, but the long-term answer isn’t trash collection — it’s getting people to not produce it in the first place,” said Robby Robinson, the partnership’s field operations manager.
Much has been written about the accumulating trash in our oceans. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch — 80,000 metric tons of plastic trash floating between California and Hawaii — is one of five massive floating trash islands, but Louisiana State University studies of the Gulf of Mexico show that the water closest to us has its own problems: 18 plastic particles per cubic meter.
In fact, EarthDay.org statistics state that every minute, two garbage trucks’ worth of plastic are dumped into our oceans, an amount that is only increasing.
Though much of that plastic and trash flows into the Gulf from the 2,300-mile reach of the Mississippi River, the Houston area has to do its part in the cleanup, too. Not only can trash pollute the the bayous and other waterways, but it also damages the environment for fish and wildlife. Rivers said that it’s not uncommon for turtles to become snagged in their trash containment booms.
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In the ocean, microplastics — tiny pieces of plastics — find their way into the food chain that ultimately ends up in our own diet, and plastics threaten the health of our coral reefs.
Robinson and Garver advocate bottle bills — legislation that would give empty plastic or glass bottles a 5 or 10-cent deposit on a container, making it more likely that people would turn them in. Putting value on the containers could result in less going into landfills or into our bayous.
Right now, only 10 states have bottle bills and while no such effort has made it very far in the Texas legislature, Maia Corbitt, president of Texans for Clean Water, says the next legislative session may move the issue forward. Last year, a bipartisan bottle bill made it to committee, though it never got a hearing.
Support is building nationally for simpler environmental efforts to address litter, from recycling to bottle bills and that can trickle down to state and local levels, she said.
"People don’t understand an issue unless it hurts their pocketbook. Illegal dumping costs Houston $22 million a year just to clean up the problem, Corbitt says. "Polling shows overwhelming support — 75 percent — for recycling programs ... and more than 75 percent of the general public supports support bottle bills."
Rivers has become an anti-litter proponent from his environmental cleanup work, which has brought all kinds of trash to his attention.
"We used to say we find everything but the kitchen sink, but after (Hurricane) Harvey, guess what? We found a kitchen sink! Two of them, actually, a stainless steel one and a cast iron one that was a lot harder to get out," he said.
Diane Cowen has worked at the Houston Chronicle since 2000 and currently its architecture and home design writer. Prior to working for the Chronicle, she worked at the South Bend (Ind.) Tribune and at the Shelbyville (Ind.) News. She is a graduate of Purdue University and is the author of a cookbook, "Sunday Dinners: Food, Family and Faith from our Favorite Pastors."
Larhonda Biggles is still seeking justice for her son years after his death at the Harris County jail, which led to the firing of nearly a dozen guards.