Storm Drains and School Spirit: How UT Students Are Cleaning Up

Now that the 2025 Texas legislative session has officially wrapped, it’s tempting to close the books and move on. But for those of us who care about clean water, sustainable growth, and the future of Texas communities, now is when the real work begins.

Take Waller Creek, a modest, urban stream that winds through the heart of the University of Texas at Austin campus and eventually flows into Lady Bird Lake. For too long, it’s been a catch basin for nonpoint source pollution — runoff from streets, sidewalks, and storm drains that picks up litter, chemicals, and debris and dumps it into our waterways. We see this across the state, but rarely is it more visible than in the form of bottle litter: plastic and aluminum containers tossed aside, left to clog up creeks and collect at stormwater outfalls.

Fortunately, not everyone is waiting around for a government mandate to clean things up. A group of UT students — the minds behind Longhorns Don’t Litter — have stepped up in a big way. Born out of UT’s Environmental Communications program, this campaign is taking direct aim at the root of the problem: behavior. They’ve rolled out storm drain labeling across campus that spells it out plainly — this drain leads to Waller Creek. They’re organizing walking tours to get students reconnected with the land under their feet. And they’re leveraging something often ignored in environmental messaging: pride.

These students understand what a lot of national campaigns get wrong. People don’t take care of what they don’t see — and they don’t protect that with which they don’t feel ownership. By tying clean water to Longhorn identity, they’ve found a way to make litter prevention personal.

While awareness alone can’t solve the problem, it is an incredibly important first step in the process to confronting this pervasive issue.

Programs like this are why we also support deposit recycling systems. Like Waller Creek, our waterways across Texas are too often filled with plastic bottles, aluminum cans, and glass containers that never should have ended up as litter in the first place. A deposit system keeps those materials in the circular economy and out of our creeks and lakes — protecting public spaces and powering American manufacturing. It’s a pro-business, pro-environment solution that aligns perfectly with the work being done on the UT campus.

Texas shouldn’t be trailing behind on this. We have the entrepreneurial spirit, the manufacturing base, and the infrastructure to make deposit recycling work — and to do it better than anyone else. Students at UT are already showing what’s possible with limited resources and a lot of creativity. Imagine what we could do with the right policy in place to support them.