| Title | Mr. Trash Wheel is Gobbling Up Millions of Pounds of Trash | |
| Date | Wednesday June 16 2021, @03:01AM | |
| Author | janrinok | |
| Topic | ||
| from the not-so-good-at-counting dept. | ||
Mr. Trash Wheel is gobbling up millions of pounds of trash:
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 millions of Twitter followers or you've eagerly posed next to him for a selfie.
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.
[...] 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.
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."
Now we need an electronic version to clean the internet seas. The web page also claims at the time of editing that it has recovered:
"5,1329 x SPORTS BALLS".
I'm not sure, but I think that is a very big number...
| Links |
printed from SoylentNews, Mr. Trash Wheel is Gobbling Up Millions of Pounds of Trash on 2024-04-19 11:25:28