In just under a year, a water wheel that was installed in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor has extracted over 160 tons of trash from the polluted harbor. Included in the garbage was 97,000 bottles, 80,000 potato chip bags and over 4 million cigarettes. The photo above shows the effect that the wheel has had on the harbor in such a short amount of time.

The device is a solar powered water wheel that is connected to a conveyor belt. The wheel works by lifting trash and debris out of the water using a ‘debris raking system’, which transfers the collected items onto a conveyor belt and then into a large dumpster. Although the device is powered by the water that flows through it, the device is also hooked up to a solar generator so it requires no outside source of energy.

The Water Wheel was developed by two scientists named John Kellett of Clearwater Mills. They have been developing the technology since 2008, and have been through a long process of trial and error to make sure that everything was correct. The first Water Wheel, which was designed to look like an actual mill house, spent three years in trials, before being removed in 2011 because it could not keep up with the level of trash that was in the Harbor. The new Water Wheel was installed this May and in it’s first major trial it removed 50,000 lbs of trash from the harbor.

Some people estimate that this could make the Baltimore Harbor swimable in 5 years, however, the area still has a serious problem with chemical pollution that needs to be addressed as well.

John Vibes writes for True Activist and is an author, researcher and investigative journalist who takes a special interest in the counter culture and the drug war.

This article (Trash Wheel Device Removes 4,000,000 Cigarettes From Baltimore Harbor) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author and TrueActivist.com.