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, by a trash trap. 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 called a trash trap, 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 the trash traps 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.

These 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 them. (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 what is collected by trash traps is just a drop in the ocean compared to the rivers of trash — particularly plastic — that are flowing into our actual oceans every year.

Read the full article about trash traps by Stephanie Castellano at Reasons to Be Cheerful.