How Houston’s Bayou-Vac Keeps Buffalo Bayou Clean

For a place Nicknamed “the city of bayous,” most Houstonians spend very little time exploring our city’s famed waterways. While there are many reasons for this (from the general unpleasant odor to the occasional oil slick to the constant lack of easy access), the most common seems to be that the bayous are pretty dirty and almost always filled with trash. In recent years, however, that excuse has started to hold less weight, at least when it comes to Buffalo Bayou, the city’s preeminent waterway. We have the enterprising folks at the Buffalo Bayou Partnership (BBP) and its Clean & Green program, funded by the Harris County Flood Control District and Port Houston, to thank for that.

For 20 years, the partnership has tried to keep the 14-mile stretch of bayou it monitors clean with a trash-collecting boat called the Bayou-Vac, but it took several different iterations to perfect it. The first model, known as the Mighty Tidy, used a conveyor belt and was useful, but it had drawbacks: The contraption also collected a fair amount of organic waste, like branches, logs and sticks.

“It wasn’t very effective. It was very slow and indiscriminate,” said Robby Robinson, BBP’s field operations manager. “It really only worked in deep water and you couldn’t get close to shore with it.”

Thanks to the ingenuity of longtime BBP board member Mike Garver, the Mighty Tidy was eventually replaced by a slightly more selective vacuum container called the Bio-Vac. Personally designed by Garver, the boat, which was in service from 2008 to 2022, allowed BBP to scale up its waste collection.

If you’re wondering what exactly a vacuum boat is, Robinson can explain: “(Garver) took a big barge, threw a vacuum unit on it, and that’s how it all started.”

Since the boat was a flat-bottomed barge, it could reach shore. The original design worked, but the main problem was that the boat’s container that held the waste was permanently attached to the ship. To unload it, the crew had to empty the container with another vacuum cleaner on land.

“You were handling the equipment twice, and it was more difficult and more of a pain to unload it than it was to load it in the first place,” Robinson says.

Another problem with the old boat was that the large 16-inch-wide, 25-foot-long pipe had to be operated manually, which was physically exhausting work for the crew.

An upgrade finally came in 2022 with the introduction of the Bayou-Vac, which addressed many of the shortcomings of the first vessel. Unlike its predecessor, the boat is equipped with a 20-meter waste container that has been modified to be physically removed from the boat for unloading. Now, when it has a full container, the team on board simply pulls up to a boat ramp, rolls the container out, and replaces it with a new one.

“We’ve reduced the process. It used to take about a day and a half to unload the goods, and now we do it in about two hours,” Robinson says.

The Bayou-Vac also features an improved vacuum hose. Instead of being manually manipulated to move it, the new unit is operated by the boat captain using a joystick that controls the hydraulic arm to which it is attached. Although the hose is moved automatically, the deckhand still participates in the process. It now has a six-foot handle that can be used to push it toward individual pieces of trash that need to be picked up.

The vacuum hose is pretty sturdy and doesn’t actually touch the water. Instead, it floats about a foot above the surface and lifts the debris out of the bayou. Since plastic is generally lighter than organic matter, the vacuum does a pretty decent job of picking up mostly that material and not other materials.

But how much trash does the Bayou-Vac actually collect? According to Robinson, the vessel gobbles up an average of 2,000 cubic yards of trash per year. To put that in perspective, a commercial dump truck holds about 12 cubic yards, which is the equivalent of nearly 170 dump trucks per year, making the Bayou-Vac a very hard-working boat.

In late May, we were able to observe the Bayou-Vac in action during a ride. It worked hard all day while its pilot David Rivers, a man with an appropriate last name, also known as “Bayou Dave,” and his crew cleaned up patch after patch of floating trash from the bayou.

Much of the trash was the kind of material you’d expect to find in the bayou. In one particularly large area near the shipping channel, we saw the ship make a Herculean effort, sucking up seven Whataburger cups, a basketball, several flip-flops, and numerous water bottles (the most common culprit). We also found a red plastic lightsaber, which we can only assume was dropped by a budding Sith Lord, since a true Jedi would know how to recycle his Kyber crystals.

Rivers, who has been operating Buffalo Bayou Boat Vacuums full time for 15 years, said he has encountered everything from beds and mattresses to floating safes and kitchen sinks.

The BBP also has a fleet of small boats that it sends out for manual collection, done by people performing community service through the Harris County court system. About half of the trash the organization gets is picked up by hand by the crews of these small boats. The BBP typically only has two at a time.

While the Bayou-Vac and the two smaller vessels have helped reduce pollution in Buffalo Bayou, it’s a never-ending job, limited by the Clean & Green Program’s small staff of just six full-time employees. With more funding, the group could expand its fleet of vacuum boats and, in the process, make further progress in restoring the health and appearance of the bayou. For now, the Bayou-Vac will continue to do its lonely trash-collecting job, making Buffalo Bayou more presentable, one Whataburger and one lightsaber at a time.