Water has carried Tatiana the Trash roughly 70 miles downstream from where it and dozens of other reusable bottles were released into a Northeast Raleigh creek more than a year ago.
Dan the Debris doesn’t appear to have made it far from where it was placed into Marsh Creek in the spring of 2025.
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Today, there are 60 cheekily named bottles that can be tracked as they journey, or not, from the freshwaters of the creek and the Neuse River and into the brackish waters of the Pamlico Sound.
They’re part of an ongoing study examining how stormwater flushes litter into local creeks, how far that litter travels downstream, and the direct link between urban trash and plastic pollution in our waterways.
“Even though we’re up here in Wake County, the Neuse River carries a lot of our pollutants down to the coast, where our coastal neighbors, unfortunately, have a cumulative impact of our river in the watersheds upstream,” said Christy Perrin, sustainable waters and communities coordinator with Waters Resources Research Institute and North Carolina Sea Grant, and co-principal investigator of the study.
To get an understanding of how litter gets into our waterways and travels downstream, researchers are digging deep to pinpoint litter hotspots and identify correlations between storms and how much trash enters individual streams during those storms.
Researchers will use their findings to guide location-specific interventions to help prevent litter from reaching waterways.
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The study was funded in 2024 through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Sea Grant Office.
As part of the study, researchers installed three litter traps in Marsh Creek, a small watershed that flows into Crabtree Creek near Interstate 440 and into the Neuse River. After each rainfall, the team removes trash captured in the traps, counts each piece of litter, and documents the different types of litter collected.
“Every time it rains, stormwater will wash trash and pollutants from sidewalks and roads and streets into our local streams,” said Madison Haley, a doctoral student in North Carolina State University’s Biological and Agricultural Engineering Department. “Here, we’re able to understand from specific storms how much trash is entering and then moving through watersheds. What we’re finding is that the higher the peak of that flow, the more trash we see.”
Researchers have found a clear link between the amount of trash captured by litter traps and the size of the nearby human population.
“The less populated a watershed is, the less trash we see typically. And the more urbanized a watershed is, the more trash we see typically,” Haley said.
Researchers teamed up with volunteers of The Great Raleigh Cleanup, a nonprofit founded in 2020 that has removed more than 45,000 pounds of litter from the city’s landscapes, to take stock of the amounts of litter along roads within the Marsh Creek watershed and identify litter hotspots.
“We do notice that roads that see higher traffic have more litter,” Haley said. “Roads that see lower traffic have less litter. Roads that are more industrialized tend to have more litter. Roads that are residential tend to have less litter.”
There is no perfect formula for pinpointing exactly what creates a litter hotspot, she said, but researchers have uncovered a definite pattern.
And they’re trying to find patterns in how litter is carried by waters downstream – how long it takes litter to get from headwaters into the river and all the way down into the Pamlico Sound.
That’s where the bottles, with a little help from citizen scientists, particularly those recreating in waters closer to the coast, come in.
Each 1-liter Nalgene bottle holds a GPS tracker and a bright-colored note with a QR code that links to the project website.
Eventually GPS tracker batteries run out of juice.
“If you ever see a bottle, there’s a chance it could be one of ours” with a tracker that has lost power, Haley said.
She asks anyone who spots a bottle while recreating on the Neuse River or Pamlico Sound to check to see if it is one of theirs. If you find one of their research bottles, simply scan the QR code, log its location, and then place it back in the water.
“It’s a good time for folks to be out there paying more attention and recreating and seeing if they can find our bottles, but also picking up trash in the process,” Haley said, noting that this month is Plastic Free July. “The point is that folks can connect more than what we do here in Raleigh, and what we do in these urban areas can impact our neighbors downstream, and everything that we do here doesn’t necessarily stay in our own community. The plastic persists for a very long time, and it moves through our waterways and our environments.”
Researchers initially released 40 bottles into Marsh Creek in April and May 2025.
Haley explained that the bottles traveled slower than researchers anticipated and they wanted to understand how bottles moved in different areas of the Neuse River. So, last February, they placed 10 more bottles into the Neuse River just upstream of Goldsboro. In April, they released another 10 bottles into the river in Kinston.
“We’re finding that the Neuse River is not just a conduit of water from Raleigh to the ocean but also is turned into this place where we’re storing lots of our trash,” Haley said. “Trash is just sitting there in the Neuse River for potentially long amounts of time, and so this study, we can see those bottles if they are sitting and staying in certain places for a long amount of time. We can see where trash is being stored within the river itself.”
She said she understands how it might be easy to get disheartened about the issue of litter.
“We all see it everywhere,” she said. “But to know how many people are interested in our work and how many people are interested in helping us is incredibly – it’s exciting and hopeful. There’s a lot of work to be done.”
