For a place nicknamed “the Bayou City,” most Houstonians spend very little time traversing our city’s famous waterways. While there are many reasons for this—from the general unpleasant odor to the occasional oil sheen and the ever-present lack of easy access—the most common seems to be that the bayous here are, well, kind of dirty and almost always filled with trash. For the past several years, however, this 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 the past 20 years, the partnership has tried to keep the 14-mile stretch of bayou it oversees clean with the help of a trash-collecting boat named the Bayou-Vac—but it took a few different versions to perfect. The first model, known as the Mighty Tidy, used a conveyor belt and was useful, but it had downsides: the contraption also collected quite a bit of organic waste, like branches, logs, and sticks.

“It was not very efficient. It was really slow and indiscriminate,” says Robby Robinson, BBP’s field operations manager. “It only really worked in deep water and you couldn’t get near the shoreline with it.”

Thanks to the ingenuity of longtime BBP board member Mike Garver, the Mighty Tidy was eventually replaced with a vacuum-enhanced vessel known as the Bio-Vac that was a bit more discriminate. Designed personally by Garver, the boat, which was in operation from 2008 through 2022, provided BBP a way to step up its trash collection.

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

Since the boat was a barge with a flat bottom, that meant it could get right up to the shoreline. The original design worked, but the main problem was that the container on the boat that stored the trash was permanently affixed to the vessel. To unload it, the crew had to empty the container with another vacuum on shore.

“You were double handling the material, and it was harder and nastier unloading the thing than it was to load it to start with,” Robinson says.

Another problem with the old boat is that the large, 16-inch-wide and 25-foot-long hose had to be manually maneuvered, meaning it 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 failings of the first vessel. Unlike its predecessor, the boat features a 20-yard trash container modified to be physically removed from the boat for unloading. Now, when it has a full container, the team onboard just has to pull up to a boat ramp, roll the container off, and replace it with a new one.

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

The Bayou-Vac also features an upgraded vacuum hose. Instead of having to be manhandled to be moved around, the new fixture is commanded by the boat’s captain with a joystick that controls the hydraulic arm it’s attached to. Although the hose is moved around automatically, the deck hand still helps in the process. It now has a six-foot handle that can be used to push it to individual pieces of trash that need to be picked up.

The vacuum hose is pretty strong, and it doesn’t actually touch the water. Instead, it hovers about a foot above the surface and lifts waste material out of the bayou. Since plastic is generally lighter than organic material, the vacuum does a pretty decent job of primarily collecting that and not other materials.

But how much garbage does the Bayou-Vac actually collect? According to Robinson, the vessel gobbles up an average of 2,000 cubic yards of trash a year. To put that into perspective, a commercial dump truck holds about 12 cubic yards, so that equates to almost 170 dump trucks a year, making the Bayou-Vac quite a hard-working boat.

In late May, we watched the Bayou-Vac in action while on a ride. It worked hard throughout the day as its pilot David Rivers, a man with a fitting last name who’s also known as “Bayou Dave,” and his crew cleaned patch after patch of floating trash from the bayou.

A lot of the waste was the kind of material you would expect to find in the bayou. In one particularly large area near the ship channel, we watched the vessel put in some Herculean effort as it sucked up seven Whataburger cups, a basketball, several flip-flops, and many a water bottle (the most frequent offender). We also found a red plastic lightsaber, which we can only guess was deposited by a bourgeoning Sith lord since a true Jedi would know to recycle their kyber crystals.

Rivers, who has piloted Buffalo Bayou’s boat vacuums full time for the past 15 years, says he has come across everything from beds and mattresses to floating safes and kitchen sinks.

The BBP also has a fleet of smaller boats it sends out for manual collection, done by people doing community service through the Harris County court system. About half of the waste the organization obtains is amassed by hand by the crews of these smaller boats. BBP usually has just two of them out at a time.

Although the Bayou-Vac and the two smaller vessels have reduced pollution in Buffalo Bayou, it’s never-ending work, work that is limited by the small staff of the Clean & Green Program, which has only six full-time employees. With more funding, the group could expand its fleet of vacuum boats, and in doing so make more progress in restoring the health and appearance of the bayou. For now though, the singular Bayou-Vac will keep chugging along in its solitary trash collection, making Buffalo Bayou more presentable one Whataburger cup and lightsaber at a time.