Mr. Trash Wheel is Gobbling Up Millions of Pounds of Trash

upstart writes:

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.

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