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Volunteer Coordinator Emily Fritz joined five volunteers for a cleanup and trash trap cleanout on Greens Mill Run on Thursday.

The urban waterway flows through Greenville, and Greensprings Park, on its way to the Tar River and is a known location for fossil hunters.

“We had a great turnout today,” Emily said. “Our wonderful volunteer, Drew Ligon, joined us, along with four students from East Carolina University.”

The ECU campus is located about a mile from Greensprings Park, but it was Sound Rivers’ newest intern, ECU student Georgia Harris, that enlisted the new trash trap volunteers.

“Georgia — our Water Watch intern — sent out a bunch of volunteer opportunities to professors and students at ECU, and we had some of them show up, which is amazing,” Emily said. “I think they just wanted to volunteer and be involved. All of them are biology students in some capacity, so this connects to what they’re studying.”

The group cleaned out a full trash trap, then expanded their cleanup along the banks of the Greens Mill Run.

“Because we had so many volunteers, the students made it all the way down to the bridge on Fifth Street, so they covered a lot of ground,” Emily said.

A total of 101 pounds of trash — much of it water bottles and Styrofoam — were removed from the trap, the creek and its banks.

“We did find a tire and some aluminum siding, and we also found some vintage, fully intact glass bottles,” Emily said.

After the cleanup, some of the student joined Emily in scouring the creek for sharks teeth.

“It was really cool because we talked to this couple who had driven all the way from Ohio to search for sharks teeth in Greens Mill Run,” she said.

The Greens Mill Run trash trap is one of 13 trash traps Sound Rivers has installed on urban waterways throughout the Neuse and Tar-Pamlico watersheds, part of Sound Rivers’ Litter-Free Rivers program.

The Litter-Free Rivers program started with a Jack’s Creek, Washington, installation in May of 2022. Since, trash traps have been added 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 added on Marsh Creek in Raleigh (in partnership with the City of Raleigh, The Great Raleigh Cleanup and N.C. State University), a second Washington trash trap on a small tributary of Jack’s Creek, on Little Creek in the Town of Clayton, on Walnut Creek, near its confluence of Lake Johnson, in Raleigh, and on Spring Branch in Smithfield.

Nearly 9 tons of trash have been removed from Litter-Free Rivers’ trash traps by an army of volunteers before it could enter the Neuse or Tar-Pamlico rivers — a step in the right direction to make your rivers litter-free.

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! Email emily@soundrivers.org or visit our volunteer signup page here.

Like Sound Rivers’ Litter-Free Rivers program? We definitely do! Donate today to help make your rivers litter-free!