Video Package by Sabrina Tevolini
Text Story by Danielle Gentry
Baltimore Watchdog Staff Writers
Baltimore celebrated an unlikely birthday boy this past Saturday: Mr. Trash Wheel!
The googly-eyed, solar and hydropowered trash interceptor living at the mouth of the Jones Falls River turned 12 this Earth Day, and the city showed up for it.
The Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore hosted the party at the Public Works Experience on Eastern Avenue, filling the space with music, local food trucks, Peabody Heights Brewery drinks and walls lined with trash wheel inspired artwork up for auction.
The proceeds will go toward educating Baltimore City students about Mr. Trash Wheel and his three friends, Professor Trash Wheel, Captain Trash Wheel and Gwynda the Good Wheel of the West.
John Kellett, the founder of Clearwater Mills LLC, said he was inspired to invent Mr. Trash Wheel in 2007 after he grew tired of watching trash pour down the Jones Falls River and into the Inner Harbor after every rainfall.
During a Christmas party that year, Kellett sketched his solution on a cocktail napkin – a giant trash wheel that could suck up plastics and other pollutants from the waterway.
Working with the city, Kellett built and installed a pilot trash wheel in 2008. However, Kellett soon realized that the initial wheel was too small and did not have enough capacity to catch and store the large amounts of debris coming down the river.
Representatives from Waterfront Partnership approached Kellett and eventually commissioned the project, raising more than $700,000 in private donations and public funding to build and install the device. Mr. Trash Wheel made his debut on May 9, 2014.
Since then, three more trash wheels have been installed in Baltimore: one at Harris Creek in 2016; another at Masonville Cove in 2018; and the third at Gwynns Falls in 2021. Together, the four wheels collect roughly 1 million pounds of litter each year.
Mr. Trash Wheel runs on solar and hydropower, using the river’s current and the sunlight to drive a conveyor belt that drops the trash into what Kellett calls “a big dumpster in his belly.”
After a single heavy rainfall, the machine has consumed up to 17 dumpsters of trash, said Chelsea Anspach, the senior manager of outreach and engagement at Waterfront Partnership, a local nonprofit that works to enhance and promote the city’s waterfront areas.
“He is literally like a soccer goalie,” Anspach said. “He is getting all the trash before it gets to the bigger body of the harbor.”
Mr. Trash Wheel’s iconic googly eyes weren’t Kellett’s idea – that came from the Waterfront Partnership.
“At first I was apprehensive,” Kellet admitted. “It’s a serious machine doing a serious job.”
He came around fast once he saw how the eyes drew people in.
The most talked-about piece in the art showcase was a handmade quilt by Deborah “Spice” Kleinman and her spouse, Elizabeth Lewis.
Hand-colored fabric depicts local Baltimore trash like UTZ chips, Zeke’s Coffee and Taharka Brothers ice cream. The piece also features staples in Maryland culture like a raven, an oriole and a crab.
The quilt was donated to the organization by Kleinman, who is the chair of the Greater Baltimore Sierra Club.
“Our earth is being smothered by plastic,” Kleinman said. “Every person on the planet is eating a credit card’s worth of plastic a week. I have six grandchildren. I’m really worried about it.”
Kellett is honest about the limits of what trash wheels can do.
“It’s a Band-Aid on a wound that needs more attention,” he said. “The real solution is keeping trash out of the river in the first place.”
Still, the data collected from Mr. Trash Wheel’s dumpsters has already helped push through a styrofoam ban and a plastic bag tax in Baltimore.
“If we get the right policies and education in place, we won’t need trash wheels anymore,” Kellet said.
Twelve years in, Mr. Trash Wheel is more than a machine. He’s proof that one sketch on a cocktail napkin can change a city’s harbor one dumpster at a time.