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This week in Washington and Greenville, Sound Rivers volunteers pitched in to pitch trash out of two creeks.

On Monday, Sound Rivers board member Betsy Hester and longtime volunteers Christina Marshen and Dawn Dolson pulled 40 pounds of trash out of Jack’s Creek trash trap No. 1.

On Wednesday, volunteers Lucas Seijo and Kevin McGoldrick met up with Sound Rivers’ Volunteer Coordinator Emily Fritz and Water Quality Specialist Taylor Register for a cleanout of the trash trap on Greens Mill Run in Greenville. McGoldrick is the Outings Chair for the Sierra Club’s Cypress Group that meets in Greenville and is no stranger to trash trap cleanouts. The Cypress Group has previously adopted the Greenville trash trap, monitoring and organizing cleanouts, and will be taking on the role again in the near future, according to Emily.

The assembled volunteers and staff netted 51 pounds of garbage from the Greenville trap.

“There were a lot of soccer balls and basketballs in the trap, and that’s pretty typical for Greenville because there’s a school right upstream, so we’re always finding their recess stuff in trap,” Emily said. “But we also pulled out a big piece of sheet metal and a soggy beanie baby.”

Both Jack’s Creek and Greens Mill Run are tributaries of the Tar-Pamlico River.

These trash traps — passive litter-collection devices — are two of 10 traps Sound Rivers has installed on urban waterways throughout the Neuse and Tar-Pamlico watersheds, as part of its Litter-Free Rivers program. The Litter-Free Rivers program launched with the Jack’s Creek, Washington, installation in May of 2022, and nine more trash traps have since been installed on urban waterways: on Duffyfield Canal in New Bern, Little Rock Creek in Raleigh, Adkin Branch in Kinston, Greens Mill Run, East Tarboro Canal in Tarboro, three more were recently added on Marsh Creek in Raleigh (in partnership with the City of Raleigh, The Great Raleigh Cleanup and N.C. State University) and a second Washington trash trap on a small tributary of Jack’s Creek.

If you or your group would be interested in working for water quality by volunteering to clean out a trash trap or Adopt a Trash Trap for a month, check out the following:

More information about the Adopt A Trash Trap program.

Find out when and where the next trash trap cleanouts are scheduled—we’d love to have your help!

Like Sound Rivers’ ever-expanding Litter-Free Rivers program? We definitely do! Donate to support keeping your waterways litter-free!