AUSTIN, Texas — Brianna Bannister and a volunteer look over a tarp before deciding to pick it up and haul it to a dumpster with the rest of the trash they’ve collected.
“If it looks like someone experiencing homelessness is using it, we won’t touch it, but this has water accumulating on it and it hasn’t rained over here in a while,” Bannister said.
Bannister spends two weekends a month organizing trash clean ups with long-time friend Victoria Felstead. Together, they started Trash Humans ATX.
“It’s a play on words. It’s slightly offensive while you’re doing some good,” Felstead explained to a group of volunteers.
Felstead and Bannister say they were inspired to help clean up Austin after meeting up at Secret Beach in Roy G. Guerrero Park. They found parts of the beach covered in trash and made a pact to clean it up.
“Felt so good and we’re like, ‘Wow, we could probably make something really big out of this.’ We went back a couple days later and that was our motivation behind it,” Bannister said. “We love this city and with how much we use its outdoor amenities it’s like, we should try to keep it clean. Even if it’s not ours. We just owe a duty to mother nature. Period.”
The volunteer group offers up opportunities to join them on Saturdays and Sundays. They choose random locations in Austin that need to be cleaned up. During one recent cleanup, they picked a wooded area behind a bus stop on Riverside and South Congress.
“I’ve been living in Austin for three years and been walking past it that entire time and I’ve always been thinking, who’s going to clean that up?” Felstead said.
While Trash Humans ATX says it is committed to raising awareness of how trash affects the environment negatively, it’s also trying to revive the message behind “Don’t Mess with Texas.”
The Texas Department of Transportation campaign to curb littering is alive and well, but the slogan has often been hijacked for different reasons since it was created in 1985.
The phrase is sometimes used as a political statement or to demonstrate the toughness of being a Texan.
TxDOT is currently targeting PPE pollution as the pandemic has caused in increase in personal protective equipment littered across Texas roadways.
“We live in a different time now and face different trash related dilemmas,” Bannister