(water rushing) Inspired by a disturbing discovery, Madison Haley is now on a mission.

I love kayaking, and so I spent a lot of time on the Haw River in my kayaks with friends and family, and I started noticing how much trash there was everywhere, and I am a little bit of a nerd, so I love maps and graphs, and so I started collecting data about all the trash that I found.

You could call it litter math, focused especially on plastic bottles.

I was shocked that about 40% of those bottles were water bottles, which was a little bit really sad and kind of like painfully poetic of this beautiful river is being polluted by bottled water, and so that kind of like really spoke to me.

And that's why, as part of her graduate work, Haley is leading researchers to litter with a purpose.

Yeah, so this is a bottle.

This is meant to be a fake litter bottle.

We are littering them, but we're tracking them, so if I open this up for you, they're full of, these are actually cornstarch styrofoam, so not plastics.

That packing protects what makes the Littering for Good project so unique.

The 20 bottles that were sent floating down Marsh Creek carry a GPS tracking device and a scannable QR code.

These communicate with my computer and all of our research team's computers, and we actually update a public dashboard, so all of these bottles are floating down the creek into the river, and the GPS trackers are telling us where they are.

The idea is to follow how everyday litter in Raleigh winds up polluting creeks and rivers, and eventually traveling the 200 miles to the Pamlico Sound, and eventually the Atlantic Ocean.

And so we'll see how fast they travel.

I think we're hoping that, I mean, hoping is a weird word to use, but we are hoping that they go all the way to the ocean so that we can understand how fast they move, but they do get stuck in all those log jams.

If you go into a creek, especially an urban creek, you'll often see these big piles of trash.

That trash gets stuck there, and it sits there potentially for a long time, and we'll be able to understand how long that trash kind of sits around, degrades into microplastics, or how fast it's moving downstream to other communities in the ocean.

What we're finding is a lot of this litter is coming after rain events.

So when the rain comes down, the stormwater all flows into local creeks and streams, and it brings with it all the trash on our roadsides and our environments.

And we are finding that the bigger the rainstorm, the more trash there is, because the more water is kind of bringing all that litter into the trash traps, and we're looking more into those patterns with our research.

Scientists estimate as much as 2 1/2 million tons of plastic are added to the ocean every year.

And much of it is litter that washes from streets and parking lots into creeks and rivers and then to the sea.

So we're trying to do both research and education.

We're figuring out if this plastic bottle gets into the creek, how far does it go?

You know, people not even making that connection, like from the parking lot, the roadway, the sidewalk, into the storm drain to the creek.

But once in the creek, how far will it go?

And, you know, what's the condition of it when it ends up in the sound?

- Data shows the plastic bottles traveled almost 30 miles downstream in just two months.

A quick pace was helped along by several large rain events.

- So anytime there's a big rainstorm and there's a lot of runoff from different parts of the city, we definitely see the volume in trash and our traps go up just because the flow rate of the streams and the rivers are higher, so that trash is moving faster and making its way downstream.

- Plastic waste is actually a two-fold trash problem.

While large pieces of plastic trash degrade the environment, each piece of plastic sheds microplastic fragments that can absorb toxins and also enter the food chain.

Earlier studies found microplastics in sample sites all along the Neuse River.

- So macroplastics, the big pieces, can be so devastating to aquatic ecosystems, to habitat and to all of the fish and the food for fish that they rely on.

So those macroplastics get, you know, animals get caught in them, they get tangled up in nests and woody debris, and that's where all of the aquatic insects like to live.

And so they can destroy an entire aquatic ecosystem by just kind of creating havoc in homes and getting in the way of the ability for fish to actually hunt and get food.

But for us humans who eat fish and for us humans who eat other critters that are in our aquatic systems, the microplastics are the biggest problem 'cause we can see and pick out macroplastics and they're gross and we don't wanna interact with them.

It makes us not wanna touch the water.

But the microplastics are the things that build up in our bodies.

And so we don't see them, those are the invisibles, but when we eat fish or when we go swimming in a waterway and accidentally drink a little bit of water, or, you know, those bioaccumulate in our bodies and they affect us in so many ways.

- The plastic bottle tracking is just one part of a larger study about litter.

It involves trash traps to identify the volume of plastic debris, microplastics counting, and studying the behavior that leads to littering.

Researchers hope to identify practical solutions to stop litter before it enters waterways.

- You know, we really wanna make that connection for people that actions here in Raleigh, littering that happens here has a consequence, right?

Locally to our Marsh Creek, to our Crabtree Creek, but also downstream to the Neuse River.

(water rushing)