Mr. Trash Wheel is gobbling up millions of pounds of trash

Mr. Trash Wheel

Trash interceptors are becoming more common in large cities, helping to stop garbage as it floats down waterways. Mr. Trash Wheel is the pride of Baltimore, helping to make a cleaner, more beautiful city waterfront.

One of the biggest personalities in Baltimore isn't playing on a sports field or occupying an office in city hall. Instead, he's performing the rather ordinary task of cleaning the city's waterways. But that's exactly what's made him famous. Maybe you're one of his thousands of Twitter followers or you've eagerly posed next to him for a selfie. 

Mr. Trash Wheel slowly swallowing a mouthful of trash.Mr. Trash Wheel

He's Mr. Trash Wheel, a large garbage interceptor that works nonstop to clean rubbish in the Jones Falls stream of Baltimore's Inner Harbor. Sporting a gaping maw of a mouth, he's winning hearts and minds by improving the prized waterfront of Maryland's largest city. And by stopping trash before it can empty into the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, he's making a difference far from the city limits. 

John Kellet, the creator of the original Mr. Trash Wheel, is the founder of Clearwater Mills, a locally owned and operated logistics company based in Baltimore. He said he got the idea for the wheel after being dismayed at the glut of trash he witnessed flowing into the harbor after it rained.

"There should be a way to stop this trash before it spreads out," he said. "I did some research to see if there was anything out there to tackle that job, and I found nothing." So he decided to try to build something. 

The problem Kellet noticed isn't limited to Baltimore. A plastic-pollution crisis is plaguing our world. After realizing that the mouth of the main river feeding the harbor was the most logical place to capture trash, Kellet drew his idea on a napkin and made a small working prototype. From there, the wheel was set in motion. Since its installation Mr. Trash Wheel has intercepted over 3 million pounds of trash, making the harbor not only cleaner and more beautiful, but also a nicer home for local wildlife as well as waterfront businesses. Four different wheels now sit in Baltimore's rivers, and soon more will be helping clean other cities across the globe. 

A simple technolog

The Trash Wheels employ a straightforward technology: A large water mill is turned by the flowing river which powers a system of pulleys that turn a large conveyor belt and an array of rakes which help scoop floating debris onto the conveyor belt as trash floats down stream. The trash wheel has 2 long floating buoys which trap garbage that's floating on the surface and funnels it into the mouth of Mr. Trash Wheel. From there it gets carried up the conveyor belt and emptied into a large dumpster. A small crew easily removes and empties the floating dumpsters as they get full.

Power for the belt comes from river currents that turn the water mill, but the Trash Wheels are also outfitted with solar panels and batteries for times when the river isn't flowing fast enough to turn the wheel. 

Mr. Trash Wheel has collected millions of plastic cups and containers from the Jones Falls Stream in Baltimore.Mr. Trash Wheel

Kellet is able to switch on pumps remotely from his smartphone that then pump water onto the wheel so it never stops turning and gobbling garbage. Mr. Trash Wheel also has an internet connection so Kellet can see what's happening on the vessel via webcam and take action if needed.

After designing his concept, Kellet contacted the city, which was open to new ideas for combating the trash flowing into the harbor. He eventually partnered with a nonprofit called the Abell Foundation, which put up money to develop and refine the Trash Wheel concept. After much trial and error and months of testing and building Mr. Trash Wheel was installed in Baltimore's Harbor. 

Once Mr. Trash Wheel was operational, business and community leaders noticed the immediate improvement in the harbor's pollution levels and lobbied to make the wheel a permanent fixture. The Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore, a nonprofit funded by a coalition of local businesses, then got involved and began a campaign to produce more Trash Wheels and install them in other areas of Baltimore. 

Adam Lindquist is the director of the Waterfront Partnership's Healthy Harbor Initiative, which aims to beautify the region by planting sustainable plants and organizing cleanup events and projects to improve the environment. He said Mr. Trash Wheel has impacted the Baltimore Harbor in ways that he could never have imagined and has delivered valuable data about where all the trash comes from.

"If you go to MrTrashWheel.com you can actually download a spreadsheet of every dumpster we've pulled out of the harbor over the past seven years, with an estimate of different types of trash that was in that dumpster," Lindquist said. "We know that we've pulled out over a million styrofoam containers from the harbor, and that's the sort of information, data and photos that we share with our elected officials to let them know just how big of a problem this is." 

Making hay of garbag

Kellet's original idea for the wheels derived from a hay bailer. He grew up on a farm, and his original vision was to have some type of machine that could go around picking the garbage out of the water and disposing of it. But he ultimately settled on a concept based on the old industrial tools and water wheel technology used for hundreds of years in waterfront cities like Baltimore. Water mills powered Baltimore's industry for decades, providing power to textile mills and lumber yards.

Mr. Trash Wheel and its cousin Trash Wheels look like big steamboats with their large water wheels constantly turning and directing trash onto the conveyor belt. But that's not all they resemble. The Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore gave Mr. Trash Wheel a persona, adding a name, along with a cute face with large googly eyes. It also gave Mr. Trash Wheel an online media presence to increase his profile and make him a city attraction. People come visit Mr. Trash Wheel, take selfies and help spread the word of maintaining a clean and sustainable environment.

"Don't Feed Mr. Trash Wheel" is a popular slogan of the campaign to help bring awareness to the pollution and littering problem. From the looks of Mr. Trash Wheel's Twitter page, he's very popular among the locals and has spawned a small industry around his likeness, with T-shirts, group cleanup events and even a local beer. 

Mr. Trash Wheel has a few relatives in Baltimore, including Professor Trash Wheel, the first female Trash Wheel; Captain Trash Wheel, who's nonbinary; and Gwynnda The Good Wheel of the West, who was recently the star of a ribbon cutting ceremony to mark her installation. They all have their own likes and dislikes on their public profiles online.

They're also hungry, with a reputation for being able to gobble up larger pieces of trash, including a guitar, a full-size beer keg and on one occasion a ball python who escaped from its owner and made a home for itself on the warm battery casing of one of the Trash Wheels. Because the Trash Wheels don't harm animals, they've become a kind of refuge for creatures seeking a safe place to nest. A mother duck once laid its eggs under the conveyor belt, and fish enjoy the oxygenated water that's created as the wheel turns in the river during the summer. 

Proud of what he's accomplished, Kellet can't believe how his idea has evolved over time.

"I never envisioned that we would have googly eyes on this machine and a name for it and a beer, and Trash Wheel T-shirts, and a Trash Wheel fan club and a Trash Wheel fan fest," he said. "It's kind of beyond my wildest dreams what's happened in Baltimore, and it's not only Baltimore. It has an internet following all over the world, and people come from miles away to come and see Mr. Trash Wheel." 

A Drone Army Is Rising Against Ocean Plastics

Solutions to remove garbage from the sea have boomed in past years, but a lot more is needed to end plastic pollution

The garbage-collecting BeachBot rover during a demonstration at a beach in the Netherlands.

Floating drones inspired by whale sharks and four-wheeled robots that resemble the Mars rover are among the latest inventions designed to remove litter from the oceans. 

The number of tools to monitor, prevent and clean up ocean pollution has grown almost exponentially over the past four years, according to a paper published in Nature Sustainability. The research, led by biologist Nikoleta Bellou at the Institute of Coastal Research Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon, is the most comprehensive analysis of sea-cleaning solutions to date.

Soccer pitches of forest lost this hour, most recent data

“Unfortunately more focus at a policy level is being given to banning single-use plastics,” Bellou said. “But we already have polluted the oceans and we need to do something to retrieve that, simultaneously to all the actions needed to reduce pollution at the source.” 

Chemicals, fossil fuels and plastics are present in all of the world’s oceans and have been found both at the surface and at the bottom of the seas. Marine litter threatens the survival of wildlife such as seabirds, whales, fishes and turtles because they can get tangled in it or confuse it with food. Tiny pieces of plastic known as microplastics can make their way up the food chain, eventually ending up in human bodies. 

As many as 91 million metric tons of litter entered the oceans between 1990 and 2015, as much as 87% of which was plastic, according to the research. An estimated 5.25 trillion particles of litter are currently floating in the oceans.

While the impacts of polluting the seas were reasonably understood by the end of the 1980s, it wasn’t until 2016 that solutions to address the problem really took off. Of the 177 methods analyzed by Bellou and her colleagues, 73% were only developed in the past four years. Most approaches so far address monitoring, with only 30 aimed at clean up, the research found. Most focus on large litter floating on the surface, meaning microplastics at the bottom of the sea remain an unresolved issue. 

Funding soared in 2014 after the European Union launched research programs such as the nearly 80 billion-euro ($97 billion) Horizon2020 initiative. About half of the ocean projects available today were government-funded, while a third were paid for through collaborations between nonprofit organizations, the public and companies, according to the paper.  

The new research, which doesn’t reveal which specific projects Bellou and her team analyzed, points to a wide range of inventions—and the challenges of scaling them up.

Solutions invented over the past few years include sea garbage bins, giant plastic-collecting barriers and a marine drone that collects floating garbage through a wide opening that mimics the mouths of whale sharks.

There’s also BeachBot, a garbage-collecting rover that picks up small litter like cigarette butts, single-use cutlery or plastic bottle caps from beaches. Creators Martijn Lukaart and Edwin Bos sought the help of students at University of Technology Delft in the Netherlands to develop an algorithm which teaches the robot to distinguish between types of trash. 

“It’s nice to develop a robot solution, but that’s not the solution to the wider problem,” Bos said. “Behavior needs to change and our goal is to make people interact and engage with the robot to make it smarter, but also to learn about the impact of litter themselves.” 

A BeachBot prototype has been deployed in several locations in the Netherlands and the two entrepreneurs say they’re ready to move toward launching the product. The next challenge is to find the right business model to ensure BeachBot doesn’t just clean, but also educates the public and changes behaviors. 

Despite recent efforts, a lot more will be needed to make a dent in ocean plastic pollution, Bellou’s paper concluded. Plastic production and waste accumulates faster than the inventions to reduce it. By some calculations, it would take about a century to remove 5% of plastics currently in the oceans using only clean-up devices.

“We have focused on what we see, because what we see is what bothers us,” Bellou said. “But there are still so many gaps that need to be filled.” 

Global Plastic Pollution May Be Nearing an Irreversible Tipping Point

Catching a big blue barrel floating on the ocean surface in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch from the German research vessel SONNE during expedition SO268/3 crossing the North Pacific Ocean from Vancouver to Singapore in summer, 2019. Credit: ©Roman Kroke UFZ

Current rates of plastic emissions globally may trigger effects that we will not be able to reverse, argues a new study by researchers from Sweden, Norway and Germany published on July 2nd in Science. According to the authors, plastic pollution is a global threat, and actions to drastically reduce emissions of plastic to the environment are “the rational policy response.”

Plastic is found everywhere on the planet: from deserts and mountaintops to deep oceans and Arctic snow. As of 2016, estimates of global emissions of plastic to the world’s lakes, rivers and oceans ranged from 9 to 23 million metric tons per year, with a similar amount emitted onto land yearly. These estimates are expected to almost double by 2025 if business-as-usual scenarios apply.

“Plastic is deeply engrained in our society, and it leaks out into the environment everywhere, even in countries with good waste-handling infrastructure,” says Matthew MacLeod, Professor at Stockholm University and lead author of the study. He says that emissions are trending upward even though awareness about plastic pollution among scientists and the public has increased significantly in recent years.

That discrepancy is not surprising to Mine Tekman, a PhD candidate at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany and co-author of the study, because plastic pollution is not just an environmental issue but also a “political and economic” one. She believes that the solutions currently on offer, such as recycling and cleanup technologies, are not sufficient, and that we must tackle the problem at its root.

Surface-floating macroplastic item with a decapod, sampled from the German research vessel SONNE during expedition SO268/3 crossing the North Pacific Ocean from Vancouver to Singapore in summer, 2019. Credit: ©Gritta Veit-Köhler Senckenberg

“The world promotes technological solutions for recycling and to remove plastic from the environment. As consumers, we believe that when we properly separate our plastic trash, all of it will magically be recycled. Technologically, recycling of plastic has many limitations, and countries that have good infrastructures have been exporting their plastic waste to countries with worse facilities. Reducing emissions requires drastic actions, like capping the production of virgin plastic to increase the value of recycled plastic, and banning export of plastic waste unless it is to a country with better recycling” says Tekman.

A poorly reversible pollutant of remote areas of the environment

Plastic accumulates in the environment when amounts emitted exceed those that are removed by cleanup initiatives and natural environmental processes, which occurs by a multi-step process known as weathering.

“Weathering of plastic happens because of many different processes, and we have come a long way in understanding them. But weathering is constantly changing the properties of plastic pollution, which opens new doors to more questions,” says Hans Peter Arp, researcher at the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute (NGI) and Professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) who has also co-authored the study. “Degradation is very slow and not effective in stopping accumulation, so exposure to weathered plastic will only increase,” says Arp. Plastic is therefore a “poorly reversible pollutant”, both because of its continuous emissions and environmental persistence.

Plastic residue being filtered out of food waste collected in Norway after fermentation to biogas and soil fertilizer. Credit: Caroline Hansen and Heidi Knutsen, NGI

Remote environments are particularly under threat as co-author Annika Jahnke, researcher at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) and Professor at the RWTH Aachen University explains:

“In remote environments, plastic debris cannot be removed by cleanups, and weathering of large plastic items will inevitably result in the generation of large numbers of micro- and nanoplastic particles as well as leaching of chemicals that were intentionally added to the plastic and other chemicals that break off the plastic polymer backbone. So, plastic in the environment is a constantly moving target of increasing complexity and mobility. Where it accumulates and what effects it may cause are challenging or maybe even impossible to predict.”

A potential tipping point of irreversible environmental damage

On top of the environmental damage that plastic pollution can cause on its own by entanglement of animals and toxic effects, it could also act in conjunction with other environmental stressors in remote areas to trigger wide-ranging or even global effects. The new study lays out a number of hypothetical examples of possible effects, including exacerbation of climate change because of disruption of the global carbon pump, and biodiversity loss in the ocean where plastic pollution acts as additional stressor to overfishing, ongoing habitat loss caused by changes in water temperatures, nutrient supply and chemical exposure.

Taken all together, the authors view the threat that plastic being emitted today may trigger global-scale, poorly reversible impacts in the future as “compelling motivation” for tailored actions to strongly reduce emissions.

“Right now, we are loading up the environment with increasing amounts of poorly reversible plastic pollution. So far, we don’t see widespread evidence of bad consequences, but if weathering plastic triggers a really bad effect we are not likely to be able to reverse it,” cautions MacLeod. “The cost of ignoring the accumulation of persistent plastic pollution in the environment could be enormous. The rational thing to do is to act as quickly as we can to reduce emissions of plastic to the environment.”

Reference: “The global threat from plastic pollution” by Matthew MacLeod, Hans Peter H. Arp, Mine B. Tekman and Annika Jahnke, 2 July 2021, Science.