Abandoned shopping carts litter San Antonio streets, hundreds end up in landfills

San Antonio is on pace this year to almost double its cost of cleaning up illegal dumping sites. In 2023 it spent $1,363,525 for the entire year. Just halfway through this year it’s already spent $1,095,692.

That includes picking up abandoned shopping carts, which have become a big problem. Residents are fighting to get them removed and they’re furious many carts end up at the landfill.

The northeast side neighborhood of Terrell Heights has become a shopping cart graveyard. They can be seen along the roadsides and on people’s property.

Some carts are abandoned after people use them to haul groceries from the three major markets nearby. Others are left at dump sites stuffed with trash.

“Our lot alone, someone came by and picked up 56,” said Ernest Spradling. He works at a bowling center called Astro Super Bowl and says he tried to get Walmart and HEB to come get the carts.

“If I owned those businesses, I’d be coming to get them, that’s a lot of money those carts aren’t a dollar a piece,” Spradling said.

Homeowner Kellie Grengs says when she failed to get Target to pick up carts, she started calling 3-1-1. Crews from the city’s Solid Waste Services have responded several times over the past two years and scooped the carts up.

“Until I found out bulk waste was picking them up and taking them to the landfill. So, in good conscience I had to stop calling 3-1-1,” Grengs said.

The City of San Antonio confirmed it does pick up more than two thousand shopping carts a year.

“Most of the shopping carts contain trash that may include clothing soiled with urine and feces, hypodermic needles, and other safety risks. The shopping carts with trash in them are collected and landfilled directly due to the safety risks. We do separate the metal shopping carts and recycle those as scrap metal if they do not contain trash.”

Target did not respond to our email.

Walmart told us: “We will continue work to recover our property as quickly as possible using several methods to recover stolen shopping carts when notified.”

HEB responded: “Our partners regularly monitor the area near our stores for unattended carts, and our stores work closely with third-party companies to retrieve carts taken from our property.”

Some grocery stores put a device on their shopping carts so if someone tries to wheel them off the property, it locks up one of the wheels, rendering the cart useless.

However we found some carts on nearby streets that had the device, which did not appear to have triggered.

Residents say they want a more organized campaign to corral the carts.

“This negatively impacts the perception and the reality of our community,” Grengs said.