A team of 40 Clean Up Australia Day volunteers have dragged 20 large bags of muck from around Ballarat's main waterway - filling the equivalent of two large trailers.

They even picked up an orange e-scooter.

"It was really heavy and it had been immersed. A couple of young (Alfredton) scouts managed to get it out. The wheels lock up, so it wasn't easy to remove," Redan Wetlands and Yarrowee River co-ordinator Col Palmer said.

"The rubbish was later collected by the City of Ballarat, so they will deal with the scooter from there.

"But the thing we came across the most was definitely drink bottles.

"I think they must have made up at least half the volume of the rubbish.

"They're bulky and they float - and they're never easy to pick up."

Mr Palmer said no one type of drink was to blame and he suspected some of the bottles had come from a long way upstream.

"The other thing I'm always surprised about is how many paint spray cans we find.

"They're always fresh. You can tell they've been used recently - and they're usually empty."

Sadly, tents, blankets, sleeping bags and pillows were also among the weekend haul.

"A lot of it was shredded, but there are people in there sleeping rough," Mr Palmer said.

"It looks like their camps would have been washed out.

"We found this sort of thing in several different spots."

He said the weight of water in late 2022 was also suspected of pushing shopping trolleys downstream.

"They can end up several kilometres away and then you end up with a tangled logjam of trolleys in the river."

The team even found a gigantic flat-screen TV among the mess.

"The thing to remember is that we are only cleaning up a small parfait of the Yarrowee," Mr Palmer said.

"There's a lot more out there."

Mr Palmer said bridges in Ballarat's south and areas around building sites in the Napoleons area were common snag-points for built-up rubbish.

And surprisingly, there were not a lot of face masks this time around.

"There were very few. It really surprised me," Mr Palmer said.

"In fact, if anything the Yarrowee was perhaps a tiny bit cleaner than usual.

"It's possible the floods a few months ago moved it downstream further than usual."

Helpers on the day included Scouts from Alfredton, Sebastopol Lions, and people from the Leigh Catchment Group and City of Ballarat.