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Neuse Riverkeeper Samantha Krop hosted middle-schoolers enrolled in Raleigh’s Neighborhood Ecology Corps for a trash trap cleanout Tuesday afternoon.

“The Neighborhood Ecology Corps is an afterschool program where the kids study all categories of ecology, like soil, forestry and water,” Samantha said. “We talked about water quality and stormwater and solutions to litter in our streams.”

Samantha introduced them to the trash trap on Little Rock Creek, one of 10 passive, litter-collection devices installed on urban waterways across the Neuse and Tar-Pamlico, as part of Sound Rivers’ Litter-Free Rivers program.

“They had a great time being in the creek. It was the first time they had worn waders. The water levels were really low, so we got to see the stream banks and the different layers of soil, which was really cool because they had just done a series on soils,” Samantha said.

The trash trap cleanout netted 15 pounds of trash, which was mostly plastic water bottles and broken-down Styrofoam.

“They were really impressed with how the trash trap is set up to work and how much trash was in there, though it didn’t look like a lot,” she said. “We did find a really cool, circa-1970s beer can. That’s always what the kids like the most: who can find the weirdest thing and what the story is behind it.”

In this case, Red, White & Blue beer was produced by Pabst until the mid-1980s, but it’s the pop top on the lid that dates the can — pop top cans were replaced by stay-top cans in the mid-1970s.

This is the fourth time Sound Rivers has led Neighborhood Ecology Corps students on cleanups and/or trash trap cleanouts. The program is run through the Walnut Creek Wetland Center, adjacent to Little Rock Creek and the trash trap.

“Since it’s supposed to be rainy this week, I told them they should be proud because they helped prepare the trap for its job to collect more trash washed into the creek by the incoming rain,” Samantha said.

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