Today in History—May 9: Mr. Trash Wheel Goes on Duty

Baltimore has a new celebrity. He’s 16 feet tall, weighs almost 100,000 pounds, and eats a lot—nearly 500,000 pounds every year.

He is a giant mechanical mollusk.

Wait, what?

On this day in 2014, after six years as a prototype, the semiautonomous, garbage-collecting Mr. Trash Wheel went into operation in the Baltimore Harbor—to great fanfare. (Including us! How can you not love him?)

When it rains, trash in the streets flows toward the harbor, where it’s caught by two huge booms and funneled into Mr. Trash Wheel’s “mouth.” A conveyor belt moves it into a dumpster on a floating barge at the back. (Designer John Kellett, of Baltimore’s Maritime Museum, was inspired by hay balers on the Pennsylvania farm where he grew up.)

Solar- and hydro-powered—basically a giant water wheel—the contraption runs itself, mostly. Humans swap full dumpsters for empty ones and keep Mr. Trash Wheel looking sharp. By 2015 he’d attracted so much attention on social media that he was given a playful public persona—and a pair of five-foot googly eyes to match it.

Stationed at the mouth of the Jones Falls, Baltimore Harbor’s largest tributary, Mr. Trash Wheel stops trash before it reaches the Chesapeake Bay.

In his first week, he collected more than 10 tons, including 300,000 cigarette butts, 2,000 plastic bags, and 5,000 plastic bottles.

When the dumpster fills, it’s hauled away by boat and incinerated. By 2015 the burned trash was already generating enough electricity to power nearly 50 homes each week. (The trash is too contaminated to recycle—for now.)

Eight million metric tons of plastic enter the oceans each year, much of it carried there by rivers.

But it’s not going through Baltimore anymore, thanks to Mr. Trash Wheel—and his expanding crew: Professor Trash Wheel (2016), Captain Trash Wheel (2018), and Gwynnda the Good Wheel of the West (2021).