This story was originally published by Reasons to be Cheerful
Cigarette butt. Gatorade bottle cap. Part of a Clif Bar wrapper. Cigarette butt. Fake nail. Styrofoam piece. Drinking straw. Styrofoam piece. Cigarette butt.
With gloved hands, Mallory Willem sorts quickly and efficiently through trash pulled from a storm drain in Cedar Key, an island town off Florida’s Gulf Coast. She pauses to examine the fingernail, painted a chalky lavender color.
“We get a lot of fake nails,” she says, tossing it onto the dull mosaic of broken-down trash.
Next to her on the sidewalk sits a mesh bag fitted to the storm drain, which had captured the items that Willem, an undergraduate student at the University of Florida, and two volunteers were now sifting through. Cedar Key has 10 such mesh traps installed in storm drains around town, all designed to prevent litter from entering the local waterways. Once a month, students and volunteers clean them out, separating manmade trash from organic debris and carefully logging the types of waste collected. Here, endless cigarette butts and plastic pieces make up the vast majority.
The project, dubbed Operation TRAP (which stands for Trash Reduction in Aquatic Preserves), is part of a growing network of groups that use technologies known as “trash traps” to capture litter before it can wash into streams, rivers and oceans. Some trash traps are relatively low-tech, like storm drain traps or booms that stretch across streams to capture floating debris. Others are cutting-edge, like swimming robots or giant trash wheels that suck trash onto conveyor belts. The trash captured ranges in size from microplastics up to mattresses and mangled bikes.
Trash traps have collected more than six million pounds of litter around the world since 2017, according to the International Trash Trap Network, a joint effort between the Ocean Conservancy and the University of Toronto to connect groups that use trash traps. (This number only takes into account data from groups that are part of the International Trash Trap Network; the real number is likely higher, says the network’s manager, Hannah De Frond.)
But that’s just a drop in the ocean compared to the rivers of trash — particularly plastic — that are flowing into our actual oceans every year.
Weighed down by negative news?
Our smart, bright, weekly newsletter is the uplift you’ve been looking for.
A new report from the Pew Charitable Trusts projects that plastic pollution will more than double by 2040. As of 2025, 130 million tons of plastic waste ended up in the environment each year. Without intervention, that number could rise to 280 million tons by 2040, an amount equivalent to dumping a garbage truck’s worth of plastic every second. And much of that waste goes straight to the sea.
Trash traps, because they are not widely adopted yet, may seem like no match for this deluge.
And the meticulous work of Willem and others to record each piece of waste collected, down to Styrofoam scraps and plastic fingernails, may seem Sisyphean. But from the trash rises an invaluable treasure: data.
“[Trash traps] are great for cleanup, but they should really be viewed as more,” says De Frond.
Trash traps not only drastically cut down on plastic pollution in waterways, they identify local sources of pollution — and upstream solutions.
In Maryland’s Baltimore Harbor, data from Mr. Trash Wheel—a giant, googly-eyed trash trap that consumes up to 500 tons of litter and debris each year — was used to support a statewide ban on polystyrene foam products, implemented in 2020, and a citywide ban on plastic bags, implemented in 2021. Since 2019, foam litter caught in Mr. Trash Wheel has gone down by 90 percent and plastic bag litter by 72 percent.
In California, trash trap data led to a plastic water bottle ban in the city of South Lake Tahoe, implemented in 2024, among similar local ordinances.
Using data from trash traps to inform such policies — policies with measurable impact — “is really what we are all about,” says De Frond. The International Trash Trap Network has grown to include more than 150 local programs across 12 countries since it launched in 2021. And it has contributed to a global picture of plastic pollution. Its 2024 report found that the top five “macro” debris items from trash traps were cigarette butts (which do contain plastic), plastic bags, plastic bottles, food wrappers, and foam pieces.
Local policymaking to prevent plastic pollution is sometimes hindered by state law, however. In the U.S., several states have introduced preemption laws that prohibit local ordinances aimed at reducing plastic pollution. In North Carolina, for example, state lawmakers in 2023 banned local governments from banning plastic containers. Since then, trash trap data has shown that 96 percent of the waste collected in North Carolina streams is plastic.
In the trash traps installed around Cedar Key, “plastic is through the roof,” says Dr. Monica Wilson, project manager for Operation TRAP. Her team will often bring baggies of some of the trash collected to local outreach events, to give people a glimpse of what they’ve pulled out of the traps.
“People are still unaware how much stuff goes down the storm drains,” she says. The ubiquity of cigarette butts seems to shock people, she adds; some smokers will come up to her to insist that they throw theirs away in trash bins instead of flicking them onto the street.
Florida is one of the states where local governments are banned from regulating single-use plastics. Yet Wilson says that her group has seen some interest in using trash traps from counties and municipalities around Florida. One of Operation TRAP’s goals is to provide local governments with a game plan for installing and maintaining the traps—even if some places don’t have the resources to analyze the trash from them.
Ideally, local governments would invest in trash traps the same way they invest in curbside trash pickup, says Wilson. But it costs money to purchase the traps and have them cleaned out regularly — which local authorities may be hesitant, or unable, to set aside.
“The major barrier right now is probably funding,” says De Frond. “Trash traps are long-term investments, and alongside the upfront cost of the technology, users also need to think about maintenance costs, personnel costs for trash removal, data collection, et cetera.”
For now, most of the groups in the International Trash Trap Network are community groups and nonprofits, which rely on grant funding and volunteer labor to do their work. But bringing in community members to clean out and sort trash has turned out to be another powerful aspect of trash traps: Volunteers are forced to confront the repercussions of their own plastic consumption.
“It was startling to see how many familiar products appeared again and again — fast food wrappers, snack packaging, plastic bottle caps,” one student volunteer with Operation TRAP wrote in a blog post for the University of Florida. “These weren’t just anonymous pieces of litter; they were reflections of everyday habits, including my own.”
“The brands I encountered in the storm drains,” she continued, “were the same ones in my own pantry.”
The bounty of trash traps also makes for compelling photographic evidence of society’s plastic habit. Photos of Mr. Trash Wheel “munching” through piles of waste in Baltimore Harbor—and making wry jokes while doing so — have turned him into a social media star; earning him more than 45,000 followers on Instagram, and inspiring Halloween costumes and works of art.
The public engagement has been great, noted Allison Blood, who manages Mr. Trash Wheel for the Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore, in a recent online meeting of trash trap groups. But the goal, she said, echoing De Frond, is for Mr. Trash Wheel and similar technologies to serve as catalysts for policies that prevent plastic waste in the first place.
“We want to retire him,” she said with a rueful grin.
The post Meet Mr. Trash Wheel and His Trash-Catching Friends appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.
