((PKG)) HARBOR CLEANUP
((Banner: Collecting the Trash))
((Reporter/Camera: Martin Secrest, Philip Alexiou))
((Map: United States / Baltimore, Maryland))
((Banner: In 2014, the Inner Harbor Water Wheel, the first of its kind, began operation at Baltimore, Maryland. It has already collected 680,000 kg. of trash))
((John Kellett, Inventor, Trash Wheel))
“So, I worked on Baltimore Harbor for 20 years, and Baltimore Harbor is a beautiful harbor. But one of the big things that people would notice, one of the first impressions they would have, would be the amount of trash that’s in the water. And most of that trash comes from the trash that’s on the land.
((Courtesy: Conway Bristow))
When it rains, all that trash gets washed off the city streets and off anywhere that it is, and gets washed down into the storm drains, or into the small creeks, and then into the river. And it comes out primarily here from the Jones Falls River.
((NATS))
((John Kellett, Inventor, Trash Wheel))
The water wheel provides the mechanical power to power the conveyer and the rakes that we have out here. The rakes push the trash up onto the conveyer, then the conveyer lifts it from the water, dumps it into a dumpster, and then we can keep cycling dumpsters through. We’ve taken out as many as 12 dumpsters in one day after a hard rain, and that added up to about 40 tons of trash.”
((NATS))
((John Kellett, Inventor, Trash Wheel))
So the water wheel powers the machine. When we have a hard rain, we get a lot of flow, and the flow pushes and turns the wheel around. A lot of the time though we don’t have a lot of flow, so what we found is that we needed to supplement that water current. And so what we did is we put solar panels, and the solar panels charge batteries, and the batteries power pumps. And all the pumps do is pump water out of the river and dump it into the buckets of the wheel. And so it’s still working as a water wheel, and it’s still providing all the power for the machine, but it’s being augmented by solar energy. So, we use hydro and solar to turn that water wheel.
((Adam Lindquist, Director, Healthy Harbor Initiative))
“I mean, Mr. Trash Wheel, the technology is incredible. But incredibly, it’s also only half the story. The other half is the Mr. Trash Wheel marketing campaign. Mr. Trash Wheel has really become a mascot for the restoration of the Baltimore Harbor. And as this technology expands to new places, we really see it becoming a mascot for keeping plastics out of our oceans. Before we installed the trash wheel, after a big rain storm, trash would just cover the Inner Harbor. You would look out on the harbor and you could walk across the trash, and get from one side to the other, right? That never happens anymore, and that’s because of Mr. Trash Wheel.
((NATS))
((John Kellett, Inventor, Trash Wheel))
You know, we started this project to clean up the harbor, but we also found that this wheel has become a real inspiration to people and an educational opportunity. You know, it’s not every day where you have a piece of infrastructure, particularly dealing with trash, that people take pictures of, and they watch, and you know, has a million hits on YouTube, and things like that. But this trash wheel has been a real opportunity to inspire people to become part of the solution.
