Volunteers sweep Lady Bird Lake for trash during annual cleanup
AUSTIN (KXAN) — Stormy clouds lurked over Lady Bird Lake Friday morning, laden with the potential to prematurely end a planned cleanup of Lady Bird Lake in Austin.
But the rain held off. Rowing Dock President Kate Aoueille said that the cleanup, with 40 partner organizations and hundreds of volunteers, couldn’t be easily rescheduled.
“We are expecting a larger turnout from last year, and we’re seeing a ton of people with a ton of trash coming back. So things are looking good,” Aoueille said.
This is the fourth year of the Trail Conservancy’s Earth Day clean-up, and CEO Julie Fisher said that more than 2,000 volunteers signed up for the event. These volunteers came from Texas grocer HEB, technology company AMD, and other companies and groups.
HEB Senior Director for Public Affairs Heidi Anderson told KXAN that the event was “an easy yes.”
“We love to say at HEB that we sell groceries to support communities, and we do that in a lot of different ways, but the environment and sustainability are one of our top pillars,” she said.
Some volunteers chose to take canoes and kayaks out on the water. They paddled along the shoreline to look for trash.
Other volunteers went over land, walking along assigned routes.
After more than an hour, the volunteers began to return.
They brought back loaded trash bags to a weigh-in station — whoever brought the most would win a prize. In previous years, the cleanup has removed literal tons of litter.
For the first batch of volunteers on Friday morning, one person returned with a few ounces over 91 pounds. That person didn’t show up to claim a prize for collecting the most trash, allowing the second-place volunteer (who gathered exactly 91 pounds) to claim a prize.
Last year, volunteers picked up around 14,000 pounds of trash.
Who found ‘weird’ trash?
A highlight of the cleanup is a participant-voted prize for “weirdest” trash.
After the volunteers’ trash was weighed, they could submit an item for consideration.
A handful of oddities that were chosen from the morning cleanup: multiple menus, a laptop, a dental kit, and a plastic flamingo.
-
A Rowing Dock worker holds up eight menus from Hula Hut, a waterfront bar that is 1.75 miles upstream from the dock. It is one of the weird items that was found during an April 25, 2025 clean up of Lady Bird Lake in Austin, Texas. (KXAN Photos/Cora Neas) -
A Rowing Dock worker holds up fire extinguisher, one of the “weird items” found during an April 25, 2025 clean up of Lady Bird Lake in Austin, Texas. (KXAN Photos/Cora Neas) -
A Rowing Dock worker holds up a waterlogged laptop, which was found inside a carrying bag. It won the morning shift’s votes as the “weirdest item” found during that shift at an April 25, 2025 clean up of Lady Bird Lake in Austin, Texas. (KXAN Photos/Cora Neas)
The winner that morning was a waterlogged laptop with its case.
