Karima Cherif has seen the future of litter reduction in San Francisco Bay, and it is a drag queen decked out in long eyelashes, boa, rainbow colors and lights. She even has a possible name in mind: Trasharella.
“It’s very in the spirit of San Francisco,” Ms. Cherif said of her vision for an exuberantly adorned machine that would pull floating trash from the water and plop it into a dumpster.
Ms. Cherif, project lead of San Francisco Bay Trash Wheel, draws inspiration from across the country, in Baltimore Harbor’s murky waters. There, Mr. Trash Wheel and two other googly-eyed garbage munchers in recent years have scarfed up tons of plastic bottles and other flotsam that had been headed for the harbor from tributaries such as the Jones Falls.
Trash wheels—floating, stationary gizmos that use water current and solar energy to power a conveyor belt—are on a roll in the U.S., at a time of growing public awareness about the environmental toll of trash on rivers, harbors, bays and oceans. Anthropomorphizing is optional.
Clearwater Mills LLC, the Maryland company that built the three Baltimore wheels, has a fourth on the way for the harbor. It has done assessments for Ms. Cherif’s group and others in Atlanta, Milwaukee and Jamaica Bay, N.Y. The city of Newport Beach, Calif., said it expects to install one in Upper Newport Bay by late 2021 using a $1.7 million grant.
In Los Angeles County, Dutch environmental group Clean Ocean will test a similar machine it calls the Interceptor for two years in Ballona Creek. Clean Ocean says two of its Interceptors are operating in Asia, with more planned. Clearwater Mills also works outside the U.S. and says it has a Panama project in the pipeline.
“There’s plenty of trash to go around,” said Clearwater Mills founder John Kellett, who said he came up with the idea for a trash wheel in 2007. While the machines aren’t a solution for waterborne trash, he said, they are “a treatment for a symptom of the disease.”
How the Trash Wheel Works
Solar panels provide additional power
The floating platform is positioned at the end of a river, stream or other tributary
Once trash reaches the top of the belt, it falls through separators and into a dumpster
24 feet
Containment booms funnel trash into the trash wheel
That trash flows downstream onto a conveyor belt
50 feet
A dumpster fits in the back on its own barge. When the dumpster is full, it is swapped out with another dumpster and emptied.
A water wheel powers the conveyor belt when the current is strong
Estimated trash collected by Baltimore's three trash wheels since 2014
1,335,807
Plastic Bottles
12,478,576
Cigarette Butts
673,218
Plastic Bags
Once trash reaches the top of the belt, it falls through separators and into a dumpster
That trash flows downstream onto a conveyor belt
The floating platform is positioned at the end of a river, stream or other tributary
24 feet
Solar panels provide additional power
50 feet
A dumpster fits in the back on its own barge. When the dumpster is full, it is swapped out with another dumpster and emptied.
A water wheel powers the conveyor belt when the current is strong
Containment
booms funnel trash into the trash wheel
Estimated trash collected by Baltimore's three trash wheels since 2014
1,335,807
Plastic Bottles
12,478,576
Cigarette Butts
673,218
Plastic Bags
Once trash reaches the top of the belt, it falls through separators and into a dumpster
That trash flows downstream onto a conveyor belt
The floating platform is positioned at the end of a river, stream or other tributary
24 feet
Solar panels provide additional power
50 feet
A dumpster fits in the back on its own barge. When the dumpster is full, it is swapped out with another dumpster and emptied.
A water wheel powers the conveyor belt when the current is strong
Containment booms funnel trash into the trash wheel
Estimated trash collected by Baltimore's three trash wheels since 2014
1,335,807
Plastic Bottles
12,478,576
Cigarette Butts
673,218
Plastic Bags
The floating platform is positioned
at the end of a river, stream or other tributary
24 feet
3
4
5
2
1
6
50 feet
Containment booms funnel trash into the trash wheel
1
That trash flows downstream onto a conveyor belt
2
Once trash reaches the top of the belt, it falls through separators and into a dumpster
3
Solar panels provide additional power
4
A dumpster fits in the back on its own barge. When the dumpster is full, it is swapped out with another dumpster and emptied.
5
A water wheel powers the conveyor belt when the current is strong
6
Estimated trash collected by Baltimore's three trash wheels since 2014
1,335,807
Plastic Bottles
12,478,576
Cigarette Butts
673,218
Plastic Bags
Note: Dimensions are for the largest trash wheel, Mr. Trash Wheel
Source: Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore
The idea is to trap trash before it flows from a river or stream into open bay or harbor waters. Booms guide debris to the trash wheel’s mouth, where rakes nudge it onto a conveyor belt. The belt is powered by an old-fashioned water wheel spun by the current and augmented by energy from solar panels. The dumpster floats on a separate platform and is taken away when full.
Since 2014, Baltimore’s three trash wheels have collected roughly 1,430 tons of garbage, including an estimated 1.3 million plastic bottles, 1.5 million foam containers and 12.5 million cigarette butts—plus a beer keg, a guitar and a python, according to the nonprofit Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore, which owns two wheels. The garbage is burned at a nearby trash-to-energy plant, though backers hope one day to recycle the plastic.
When Mr. Trash Wheel made its debut in 2014, it had zero personality or human features. Days later, a YouTube video of it in action went viral, and a marketing firm advised the Waterfront Partnership to capitalize with a cartoonish makeover.
“I went home and built the first set of googly-eyes in my basement,” said Adam Lindquist, who directs the partnership’s Healthy Harbor Initiative.
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The partnership has since added Professor Trash Wheel, and the Maryland Port Administration operates Captain Trash Wheel. Today the machines all have separate social-media accounts. The partnership sells merchandise like plush toys and T-shirts reading “Please don’t feed the trash wheels.” A local craft brewery makes an IPA called Mr. Trash Wheel.
The machines vary in size and cost between $400,000 and $800,000, including design modifications, permitting, transport, assembly and installation, said Mr. Kellett. In Baltimore, the money has come from grants and fundraising. Mr. Lindquist said it costs about $175,000 a year to operate his group’s two wheels, $100,000 of which comes from Baltimore’s Department of Public Works.
Baltimore needs “anything and everything that works to get trash out of the waterways,” said city public works spokesman Kurt Kocher.
Newport Beach officials heard about the trash wheel on social media, said John Kappeler, a city engineer. He said the trash wheel will help cut down on trash in the pristine upper bay and give visiting schoolchildren a tangible lesson on littering.
“We’re trying to make the connection between the Starbucks coffee cup 10 miles inland from Newport Bay that ends up in the bay,” Mr. Kappeler said, adding that officials are still angling for a “cool, catchy name.”
If Milwaukee gets a trash wheel, its name will probably riff on Lynyrd Skymmr, the garbage skimmer boat operated by the local sewer authority, said Lilith Fowler, executive director of Harbor District Inc., an organization formed to revitalize the city’s harbor and surroundings. She said her group is about ready to embark on a fundraising campaign.
“After every spring rain, you see this kind of flotilla of trash moving through the city and headed toward Lake Michigan,” she said.
In New York City, a feasibility study identified the outfall of Fresh Creek in Brooklyn as a good location for a wheel to stem the tide of trash entering Jamaica Bay, said Alex Zablocki, executive director of the Jamaica Bay-Rockaway Parks Conservancy. As in Milwaukee, funding is the key hurdle, he said.
In San Francisco, Ms. Cherif said an anonymous Argentine benefactor has promised $100,000, but only if others pony up the remaining $300,000 to $400,000. “There’s a lot of money in Silicon Valley. A half a million bucks is a drop in the bucket really,” she said.
A longtime paddleboard and sailing enthusiast, Ms. Cherif said floating trash in the bay has “just become worse and worse.” Clearwater Mills’ site assessment looked at five potential spots, and she said San Leandro Creek on the bay’s east side probably makes the most sense.
Baltimore’s experience shows the trash wheels are no cure-all. The city also uses four skimmer boats that cruise around the harbor scooping up trash. They collected 503 tons of garbage last year, the most in five years, but officials note that 2018 was unusually rainy.
The fourth trash wheel will be the biggest yet, Mr. Lindquist said. This time the waterfront partnership will let the public pick the name from a handful of finalists. So far thousands of submissions have come in, including lots of Trashy McTrashfaces, and many playing off the wheel’s location at the mouth of the Gwynns Falls on the western shore.
One that Mr. Lindquist likes: Gwynnda the Good Wheel of the West.
Write to Scott Calvert at scott.calvert@wsj.com
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