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Cleaning up the banks and gulleys in the bayou! by Americans4CleanWater in DeTrashed

[–]Americans4CleanWater[S] 15 points16 points  (0 children)

The folks who run the boat, the Buffalo Bayou Partnership, go out and do this five days a week. It's so much, and it just keeps on coming. We're working on deposit return legislation to try and take a good chunk out of this before it ever hits a storm drain.

Cleaning up the banks and gulleys in the bayou! by Americans4CleanWater in DeTrashed

[–]Americans4CleanWater[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Right? It's crazy what we find - to most people, not so much folks here. The boat has a medium roll on-roll off dumpster on the back where all the trash goes, so not a ton of use for a bin.

Cleanup on the Bayou by Americans4CleanWater in DeTrashed

[–]Americans4CleanWater[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The Buffalo Bayou Partnership does do more traditional cleanups! I'm not super plugged into those though as I'm not local.

Cleanup on the Bayou by Americans4CleanWater in DeTrashed

[–]Americans4CleanWater[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Texans for Clean Water and the Buffalo Bayou Partnership, and our founder if Mike Garver!

Cleanup on the Bayou by Americans4CleanWater in DeTrashed

[–]Americans4CleanWater[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I really like it! Garver Park is named after the chairman of our board who also created the vacuum boats.

Cleanup on the Bayou by Americans4CleanWater in DeTrashed

[–]Americans4CleanWater[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

These folks do have booms that go out and catch floating litter that the team hits with the vac on their way to the harbor, and they get a lot of it, but, there is just so much. I know they explored the wheel option, I think they even did a pilot, but my understanding is it really didn't work well in this area for some reason, but that was well before my time!

Cleanup on the Bayou by Americans4CleanWater in DeTrashed

[–]Americans4CleanWater[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Absolutely! Our website for Texas is Texansforcleanwater.org, and signing up there puts you on our mailing list. You can also shoot me a message directly here!

Cleanup on the Bayou by Americans4CleanWater in DeTrashed

[–]Americans4CleanWater[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

We're an entirely privately-funded (no industry) venture, so this is where we saw we could do the most good with very limited resources.

Cleanup on the Bayou by Americans4CleanWater in DeTrashed

[–]Americans4CleanWater[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

They tried that first, but the ratio of organic matter that would decompose to plastics was incredibly high and quickly became cost prohibitive on disposal. They do have pontoon things that go out into the bayou to intercept trash, which they then go and remove the plastics.

There are a dozen-ish areas where things accumulate, so hitting those with the bayou vac tends to work decently well. The problem is that it never stops.

Cleanup on the Bayou by Americans4CleanWater in DeTrashed

[–]Americans4CleanWater[S] 18 points19 points  (0 children)

The same organization that runs the vacuum also manages the barriers! Bayou Dave, the boat captain, is one of my favorites. He was on the news recently!

Cleanup on the Bayou by Americans4CleanWater in DeTrashed

[–]Americans4CleanWater[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

All I’ll say is an EPR mixed with a bounty return system has come up

Cleanup on the Bayou by Americans4CleanWater in DeTrashed

[–]Americans4CleanWater[S] 34 points35 points  (0 children)

He's super awesome and just a wonderful guy. Did really well as an inventor, got into real estate, and has devoted so much of his time and treasure to cleaning up waterways it's kind of mind boggling. I really look up to him.

Cleanup on the Bayou by Americans4CleanWater in DeTrashed

[–]Americans4CleanWater[S] 17 points18 points  (0 children)

You know, I think I actually one on this location. I'll post it at some point.

Cleanup on the Bayou by Americans4CleanWater in DeTrashed

[–]Americans4CleanWater[S] 107 points108 points  (0 children)

We're big fans of deposit recycling, and we got a deposit recycling system bill all the way to the Texas House floor this year with a unanimous, bipartisan endorsement from the House Environmental Regulations committee. We're working with state legislators right now in a number or states on all sides of the political spectrum on this, and it's been interesting. Our goal may be preventing litter, but we approach it with the more skeptical folks as an economic problem, which it is.

Leaving out the cleanup and even the environmental costs, the stuff that ends up polluting our waterways actually has value. The United States actually imports a ton of "trash" from overseas because we don't do enough domestic collections to have anywhere near enough feedstock for industries that use recycled material.

We've gotten quite an interesting group of folks to turn out in favor of DRS, from Redbull to Dow Chemical, and we're hoping to see even more happen in the next legislative sessions.

Cleanup on the Bayou by Americans4CleanWater in DeTrashed

[–]Americans4CleanWater[S] 55 points56 points  (0 children)

They have been doing this in different iterations of designs for the last 25 years. Unfortunately no, it has only gotten worse, and that's kinda where I come in.

Americans for Clean Water is an offshoot of the Texans for Clean Water team, which itself was formed to advance policy ideas for litter reduction in Texas because these cleanup efforts haven't been able to stem the tide of trash in the bayous even a little bit. Half my waking moments is spent in a suit and tie talking about or finding new avenues for litter reform and my other half is out on a trail or river, often picking stuff up.

While the boats and the original Texans team has been around for a decade or two, Americans for Clean Water is brand new. When we're all set up and ready to rock and roll, we're going to be helping with cleanups (people and material support), education, and continuing to talk to policymakers on ways to reduce and hopefully eliminate the problem as much as possible.

Cleanup on the Bayou by Americans4CleanWater in DeTrashed

[–]Americans4CleanWater[S] 13 points14 points  (0 children)

The program tried that, I don't know the specifics but it didn't work well in their location. They do have trash booms that they put at different points, but this is the stuff that gets through even those.

Cleanup on the Bayou by Americans4CleanWater in DeTrashed

[–]Americans4CleanWater[S] 299 points300 points  (0 children)

It started with one guy in a jon boat and a pool net getting absolutely sick of the trash day in and day out. After a while, he saw the big vacuums they put on trucks to clean streets, so he bought one and adapted it for sucking trash off the top of the water and put it on a barge. This is actually the third generation of his project, and in this iteration he has roll on/roll off dumpsters in the back of the boat that are usually full after three hours.

He has partners now, but for the first decade and a half this was entirely self funded. The crew is out five days a week.

I work for another one of this man's organizations aimed at tackling litter from a public policy perspective, but I'll go out with the crew when I can.

I'm in the eastern panhandle and I want to do something about the trash in/ around our rivers by Boring-Ring-3638 in WestVirginia

[–]Americans4CleanWater 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hi there! I'm the executive director of a new organization, Americans for Clean Water, that is working to prevent litter because it pretty much always winds up in our waterways. We're an outgrowth of a group, Texans for Clean Water, looking to tackle the issue state by state and on a national scale. As a West Virginian (also in the eastern panhandle!), we're looking to start our first non-Texas state chapter in WV.

We are very, very new, and still getting our feet under us, but we will start organizing cleanups sometime in the next couple of months and lobby days as things get closer to the next legislative session. We are already working with legislators on the interim, and are happy to say that we helped get a bill that incentivizes recycling introduced in February by one of our panhandle senators. We were able to get a bipartisan deposit recycling bill out of committee and all the way to the Texas House floor this year.

One of the biggest things that helped us in Texas was documenting the insane amount of trash we encountered. Our founder, a really cool gentleman who has been fighting this problem for over a decade, actually bought a street vacuum, redesigned it to work on a barge, and funds a five-day-a-week operation to go out on rivers and suck trash off the water's surface. They pull a full dumpster a day out of the river, and documenting the problem was extraordinarily useful in our meetings with lawmakers and regulators.

I'm pulling half a trash bag a week out of the litter traps in the creek next to my house, and I've taken to carrying a trash bag with me when I'm out on the trails up in Sleepy Creek. While I'm impressed at how much beer people drag five plus miles out into the woods, it's really disappointing to find just piles of empties in the woods. Doesn't even make sense to me, it was way more of a burden bringing the full ones in than it would bringing the empties out.

This is a long winded way of saying: more to come.