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THE PROMISE OF MR TRASH WHEEL

Carolyn Kormann

 John Kellett, the former director of Baltimore’s Maritime Museum, used to cross a footbridge over Jones Falls, the largest tributary (21) into Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, every day on his way to work. “When it rained, there was a river of trash flowing down,” he told me. He (22) twenty years working on the harbor, primarily in environmental education and shipbuilding, and had a deep knowledge of its hydrodynamics and history. City officials, he told me, “said they were open to ideas, so I started sketching.” He drew plans for a machine powered by an (23) water wheel—a technology that (24) a staple throughout the city—designed to intercept trash at the mouth of Jones Falls, which is the main (25) of harbor pollution. A prototype was installed in 2008. By 2014, Kellett’s invention was reborn as Mr. Trash Wheel—a fifty-foot-long machine, weighing nearly a hundred thousand pounds, which resembles a friendly mollusk, with giant, (26) eyes and its own Twitter account.

 Years later, Mr. Trash Wheel has spawned three replicas around Baltimore—Professor Trash Wheel, Captain Trash Wheel, and another that was announced last week but has yet to be named or installed in the water. Three local beers are named in their honor, and the city has both a trash-wheel (27) festival and a society dedicated to promoting environmental awareness known as the Order of the Wheel. As plastic pollution in the world’s oceans has become a growing crisis, the trash wheels have gained an international following. “Over the last few years, I’ve been getting calls and e-mails from all over the world,” Kellett said. A Japanese film (28) visited last week. “I’m still kind of in shock about how much attention it has garnered,” he went on. “Never in my wildest dreams would I ever have thought that this idea I sketched on a napkin would lead to all this.”

Adapted from: The New Yorker in https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-promise-of-mr-trash-wheel [Accessed on 7th April 2021]