Tossing trash into the water to get a handle on how much garbage is traveling down the river from the city to the coast? That’s what’s happening in a research project in eastern North Carolina. The project is turning everyday trash into high-tech messengers to figure out exactly how litter travels from North Carolina city streets to the Atlantic Ocean.
Led by NC State and NC Sea Grant, the study involves releasing GPS-equipped plastic bottles into the Neuse River to track their movement in real time. The goal is to solve the mystery of how land-based waste transforms into the marine debris that clutters our coastlines.
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North Carolina State University’s Dr. Barbara Doll is a Professor of Ecological Restoration and the project manager. She said they’re working to determine, “What's the what we call load of this material? How much of that is plastic? And what's the consequence of all this plastic if it gets into these local creeks, the river, or the sound?”
The problem is massive, with millions of tons of plastic waste entering the ocean worldwide every year. Because North Carolina has several major river basins that drain into the Albemarle-Pamlico National Estuary—the second largest of its kind in the country—the state's waterways act like a highway for floating trash.
To better understand this journey, researchers previously released 40 tracked bottles in Raleigh. Over the last year, many of those bottles managed to drift past Smithfield, giving the team a clear look at how debris moves through the upper parts of the river.
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N.C. State PHD student Madison Haley runs a lot of the research for the project, and said, “A lot of that loading is coming from urban areas, and Raleigh is one of the biggest urban areas in that watershed. So, a lot of our focus is actually in Raleigh, but it's all connected. Everything that enters the streams in Raleigh slowly flows down into bigger streams and bigger streams and into the Neuse River, and that's going towards and through eastern North Carolina.”
Now, the project is expanding into the lower Neuse River. A fresh set of GPS-tracked bottles was released from Goldsboro earlier this year, and a third set more recently in Kinston. By starting further downstream, the team hopes to complete the story of how plastic gets stuck in certain areas, flows through local communities, and eventually reaches the open sea. It is a small but vital part of a much larger effort to reduce consumer debris across the Southeast.
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Beyond the GPS tracking, the team is also sampling for microplastics, counting trash at various sites. Doll said, “It's mostly plastic, generally over 90% is plastic, and then of that is it breaking down into these smaller fragments called microplastics.”
“I think a lot of us see really scary headlines right now about microplastics, about how they're in our bodies and our brains and our reproductive organs. And I think it's getting a lot of press and it's on people's minds,” Haley added. “And one thing that I think is critical about the issue of plastic pollution is acknowledging that there are a lot of different scales at which we can look at it and try to help prevent it or make it better. Like for this project, we're looking at a huge range of things, but one of them is litter.”
Further research is also likely to piggy back on the findings of the study. Doll said, “There's a lot of studies, that are collecting the crabs or fish or oysters, and they are sampling the actual organism to say how much is in that. And so, it's, relatively new emerging contaminant. And some of these questions still have to be asked because anytime we have a water quality contaminant and for it to be regulated or whatever their needs, they have to have a standard that says this is, and this is how we sample and measure it.”
The project also relies on people to help out in the field. Anyone that happens to spot one of the bright, labeled bottles while out near the river is asked to scan the QR code on the label to report the sighting.
“If folks are out kayaking or on their boats, if you see a pink or orange bottle, please scan the QR code and let us know where you found it. Send us a picture, put it back if you do find it,” Haley said, “But, yeah, that's a really fun citizen science. And it's not just that you can find the bottles out in the river, it's that you can all track them.”
The project also studies the specific human behaviors that lead to littering in the first place. The ultimate goal is to use this data to create a community toolkit that helps towns across North Carolina keep their watersheds clean.
