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Neuse Riverkeeper Samantha Krop and water-quality intern Samantha Lewis spent Wednesday morning hunting down future trash trap locations.

The Sound Rivers team met up with Johnston County Parks and Open Space Coordinator Austin Cross and Town of Smithfield employees to visit a couple of sites that could be home to one of Sound Rivers’ passive litter-collection devices, part of its Litter-Free Rivers program.

“We were doing a scout to whittle down the location where we want to put a trap, and there are a couple of good options,” Samantha Krop said. “It’s always a lot of fun to scout for a trash trap because you have to consider a lot of variables.”

Some of those variables include the flow rate of stream, whether it floods and how often, how much litter is moving through the area, whether the channel is wide enough, if the stream is flowing through an urban or forested area, if it’s easily accessible — the list is long.

“It was great to have Austin and the folks from Smithfield along because we draw on their knowledge about what those streams are known to do,” Samantha said.

Samantha will be presenting the trash trap plan to the Town of Smithfield’s council on July 1. If approved, a Smithfield trash trap will be No. 12 in Sound Rivers’ ever-expanding Litter-Free Rivers fleet. In three years, the program has grown from a single trash trap on Jack’s Creek in Washington to four traps in Raleigh, two in Washington and one each in Kinston, Tarboro, New Bern, Greenville and Clayton.

Samantha said the best location scouted in Smithfield was downtown, adjacent to a community garden.

“It’s already undergone a stream restoration courtesy of a North Carolina Land and Water Fund grant, so it would be nice to add to the work that’s already been done on that stream,” she said.

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