VOLUSIA COUNTY, Fla.  — Cities across Volusia County are using floating trash barriers called “Watergoats” to help reduce pollution in local waterways. 

What You Need To Know

  • A Watergoat is a floating trash barrier that collects and stops trash from entering the ocean and intracoastal

  • Holly Hill was the first city on the county-canal system to install a Watergoat

  • Over the past two years, the Watergoat and volunteers have stopped 2,000 pounds of trash from entering the Halifax River

  • The City of Port Orange is planning to install a Watergoat at Riverwalk Park this spring

In Port Orange, the city’s Environmental Advisory Board is planning to install a Watergoat at Riverwalk Park this spring — becoming the latest city to use the device to prevent litter from entering the Halifax River. 

In 2021, Holly Hill became the first city on the county’s canal system to install a Watergoat, which is a floating trash barrier designed for streams, canals and lakes. The device works by collecting trash that washes in from storm drains and stopping the litter from entering the ocean or intracoastal. 

According to Watergoat, nearly 200 devices are deployed across the country. Per the company, Watergoats have stopped more than 600,000 pounds of trash from entering the ocean.

While the Watergoat collects the trash, local volunteers are the ones who empty it. In Holly Hill, teacher Ariel Kavanagh is the organizer behind Watergoat cleanups. It started when she founded Holly Hill Eco Friends, a community group that holds both waterway and roadside cleanups across the city. She founded the group in late 2020, after seeing how much trash a storm brought to the city’s waterways.

“I started picking it up myself and I thought, ‘There’s probably other people who want to help with this,’” Kavanagh said. “So, I made a couple posts to Facebook and before you knew it, I had so many people who wanted to come out regularly and do cleanups.”

Just over three years later, the group has grown to nearly 400 members on Facebook. Kavanagh and volunteers hold regular cleanups in Holly Hill. Kavanagh said the city’s greatest assets are its waterways, and that keeping them clean is important to her and other volunteers. 

“We have a lot of wildlife that inhabits this area — rabbits, otters, sea turtles — and we want to keep it clean for them,” Kavanagh said. “It’s just the right thing to do.”

The Watergoat was installed in the fall of 2021, much to the credit of Suzanne Scheiber who is the founder and president of Dream Green Volusia. She came up with the idea and presented it to the City of Holly Hill. She worked for months to facilitate coordination between the city, county and Watergoat to make the installation happen. She even secured funding from the Surfing’s Evolution and Preservation Foundation to provide the Watergoat to the city free of cost. Officials said the Watergoat would not have happened without Scheiber. 

The Watergoat is located in a canal behind Sica Hall Community Center. The canal leads into the Halifax River and then into the ocean.

“It seemed like the best location to put it, because the city of Holly Hill was flexible enough to work with us to be able to do this,” Scheiber said. “Being that the canal actually has about three to four cities worth of trash flowing, it is an ongoing process and it just made sense to put it at this location.”

In these before and after photos in Holly Hill, one can see how much trash was collected from the Watergoats and then cleaned up by local volunteers. (Spectrum News 13/Reagan Ryan)

 

Scheiber, Kavanagh and other volunteers have worked to maintain and clean the Watergoat. 

Kavanagh said the trash collected comes from a handful of cities across the county. 

“All this trash is coming from multiple cities,” she said. “Daytona Beach, Ormond Beach, all the way down LPGA canal, Nova Road canal.”

The cleanups work by pulling the Watergoat to shore, collecting the trash with nets and handpicking smaller pieces. Kavanagh said the group always cleans up a lot of styrofoam and plastics.

“Plastic bottles, a lot of plastic bottles, shoes, pens, a lot of disposable food items,” she said.

They find unexpected things, too. Kavanagh said when she first started the cleanups, she didn’t realize she would need a sharps disposal container. Now, she finds at least one or two needles every cleanup.

“I don’t know what’s in them and that the needles might hurt somebody or something and possibly get lodged up somewhere it shouldn’t be in,” Kavanagh said.

In their latest cleanup, Kavanagh and volunteers cleaned out 75 pounds of trash from the Watergoat. In the past two years, the group has picked up nearly 2,000 pounds of trash — all of which would have entered the Halifax River if it weren’t for the Watergoat and the hard work of the volunteers. 

“It is crazy to think about how much trash was getting through here before this was here,” Kavanagh said. “I want people to know that this is where it stops, and that’s a really cool thing if you think about it.” 

Kavanagh said it’s satisfying to see the before-and-after of each cleanup. She said it’s powerful knowing that the trash’s journey through the water ends here. 

Reagan Ryan is a 2023 — 2024 Report for America Corps Member, covering the environment and climate across Central Florida for Spectrum News 13. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues.