If you’ve ever been to Baltimore and walked alongside the Inner Harbor, then you might have seen Mr. Trash Wheel making its way through the running waters.
An icon in the city, the crazy googly-eyed trash machine has managed to eat up millions of pounds of river-borne garbage from the city, and has been doing so for years! Aside from being a city attraction, it does an excellent job of keeping the river clean! And because of how popular it’s become, other cities are choosing to create and adopt their own versions of the trash wheel like Captain Trash Wheel and Professor Trash Wheel.
The genius behind this creation is inventor John Kellet. The idea came to him after he happened to walking along the footbridge that spanned the Jones Falls stream that leads into the Baltimore harbor when he noticed the amount of trash that was flowing into it. This promoted him to look into the city’s Inner Harbor trash problem.
He began to wonder what the city’s solution to the trash issue of the river was, but he felt like there wasn’t one. This is when he managed to come up with an even better solution for the city. He not only removed the eye sore of the trash on the river, but he also gave Baltimore’s Inner Harbor a refreshing facelift alongside a comical and adorable social media icon for people to see and admire. But the inventor also admits that someone else gave him the idea to put googly eyes on the barge that has made it so likeable.
Back in 2017, media outlet GNN reported that Mr. Trash Wheel actually works by gaining it’s power to rotate form the river’s current. And if the river cannot generate enough electricity to move the powerful machine, the wheel uses solar energy instead.
John Kellet runs and operates a company called Clearwater Mills. They specialize and design cages to fit inside storm drain outfalls, which is usually the areas where the major garbage pollution comes from within the harbors.
Kellet’s creations have become so successful that a number of other companies and organizations have created their own versions of Mr. Trash Wheel. Like in the Gwynns Falls River in Maryland, they have made Gwynda the Good Wheel of the West. Meanwhile in Oakland, California, they are creating another one which they’ve named Trasharella.
Moreover, there will also be the very first international Mr. Trash Wheel that is being built for Panama named “Mrs. Wheel” or “Doña Rueda.”
Kellet shared in a documentary with CNET, “I never envisioned we would have googly-eyes on this machine, with a name for it and a beer [named after it], and the trash wheel t-shirts and a trash wheel fan club and a trash wheel fan fest, it’s kind of beyond my wildest dreams.”
Notably, because of the way rivers end up depositing major and bulk amounts of trash in the oceans, the Mr. Trash Wheel brand has since become one of the ‘most important concepts of modern pollution theory.’ One particular non-profit named The Ocean Cleanup, that works to remove garbage from the oceans by using complex green energy river trash interceptors, explains on their website that ‘80% of all the trash found it the ocean comes from one thousand of the world’s rivers.’
Aside from sharing the shocking information on the amount of trash and plastic pollution found in the oceans, the documentary also proposes to those watching to get their local politicians to create and install their very own Mr. Trash Wheel in their cities by sharing the horrifying facts of the global trash issue and how the Mr. Trash Wheel has the ability to ‘collect 38,000 pounds of trash per day.’ The documentary also suggests that another major reason to get a Mr. Trash Wheel is because people actually love to come and see them, which means it can become a huge social media influencer in their corner of the country.
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