About the
Brazos Valley Clean-up Challenge

Oh! There is a trophy involved! The entry that picks up the most trash between March 1 and May 31, 2024 will be the BIG WINNER!!!

Take photos to show how many bags of trash have been collected.

The Brazos Valley Clean-up Challenge is a program designed to support the local efforts of Keep Texas Beautiful affiliates, non-profits, volunteers, corporations, scout groups, and other community groups as they collaborate efforts with their cities and counties throughout the region. The cleanup events can take place in any public area, such as parks, schools, main street/downtown, watershed areas, and roadways. 

Participants may enter as a city, community, or a county and one of them will be the BIG WINNER! 

The community with the most litter collected during their cleanup can proudly display their trophy in their City Hall or in their County. Each year the trophy will move from community to community adding their name to the legacy of litter cleanup efforts in the Brazos Valley. 

To make the competition equitable across all communities in the Brazos Valley (big and small), we calculate the weight of collected litter and trash, number of volunteers, and volunteer hours on a curved per-capita basis. This means that we divide the efforts logged by a city’s population factor. The population factor is a bell curve of all Brazos Valley populations compressed to a total difference of 250,000 from highest to lowest.

For population numbers we use the Brazos Valley Council of Governments’ 2019 Population Estimates. This data is publicly available for download via the Regional Data Center.

The formula for calculating each city’s score is as follows:

( ( (Number of Events/Reports X 3) + (Total Volunteers X 2) + Total Bags Collected) X 10000) / Population Factor