Mr. Trash Wheel - This guy is cleaning Baltimore harbor!

Mr. Trash Wheel is a water-wheel vessel that is used to remove trash from Baltimore's Inner Harbor. Mr. Trash Wheel uses the current from the Jones River to propel a wheel which in turn powers a conveyor belt that lifts trash from the water.

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The conveyor then transports the trash to a dumpster and, once full, the dumpster is towed away by boat and replaced with a new one. When the current is sluggish, Mr. Trash Wheel has a backup motor which is 100% solar powered. Awesome!

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Where did Mr. Trash Wheel come from?

While walking to work, John Kellett noticed the way the trash was flowing in the river and came up with the idea. In 2008 a pilot machine was built and installed at the harbor by Kellett. He then built a larger machine that was launched in May 2014, which could hold two dumpsters instead of the one that the pilot machine held. This meant that the machine could operate for longer and sending vessels to empty the dumpsters could be done less frequently. Mr. Trash wheel is part of Baltimore's "Healthy Harbor Plan", which aims to clean up the harbor to the extent that it could be swimmable by 2020. Mr. Trash Wheel cost $720,000, which was paid for from private and public funding. In 2015, the Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore began raising funds to construct a second wheel off the Boston Street Pier Park, which was nicknamed "Professor Trash Wheel".

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Where does the trash come from?

When people throw their rubbish on the ground instead of into trash cans or recycling bins, rain water carries this trash into storm drains. The trash then flows unfiltered into streams and into the Jones River and eventually ends up in Baltimore Harbor and the Chesapeake Bay. The Jones Falls begins as a stream in Baltimore County, and is met by other streams until it becomes a river in Baltimore City. This map shows the Jones Falls watershed, which is an area of land that all drains to the same body of water. The Jones Falls watershed drains 58 square-miles of land, and the trash can come from anywhere in this area:

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Facts about the Mr. Trash Wheel

• The most trash collected in a single day weighed in at 38,000 lbs or 17,000 kg!
• Trash collected is incinerated to generate electricity which powers Maryland.
• The solar panels can generate 2,000 watts of electricity - enough to power a typical Maryland home.
• If you lined up all the cigarette butts collected by Mr. Trash Wheel, they would stretch over 70 miles or 110 km!
• Adam Lindquist, director of the Healthy Harbor Initiative, first added "googly eyes" to Mr. Trash Wheel on October 30, 2015

Here is a time lapse video showing how Mr. Trash Wheel collected trash over a 6 hour period, and another more detailed video tour of the machine:

Time Lapse
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Tour of the machine
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Mr. Trash Wheel removal stats since May 9, 2014:

• 640,000 plastic bottles
• 740,000 Polystyrene Containers
• 9,391,600 cigarette butts
• 8,000 glass bottles
• 525,000 grocery bags
• 730,000 chip bags

If this initiative could be used in harbors around the world where the technology can be applied, the amount of trash collected worldwide would certainly make a huge difference to sustaining our planet. And the fact that it runs completely from water or solar power and then in turn uses the trash to generate electricity is simply fantastic. Mr. Trash Wheel is proving that free energy does not have to be a myth, well done!

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Sources:

www.wikipedia.org
www.atlasobscura.com
www.baltimorewaterfront.com