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, a Dutch environmental group called the Ocean Cleanup will test a similar machine it calls the Interceptor for two years in Ballona Creek. The Ocean Cleanup 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.”
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 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.
Write to Scott Calvert at [email protected]
Corrections & Amplifications
The Ocean Cleanup, a Dutch environmental group, plans to test a trash interceptor in Los Angeles County. An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to the group as Clean Ocean.