Towson students to create trash ‘cake’ for Mr. Trash Wheel for Earth Day

By Hailey Ensor, Staff Writer

Towson University’s Office of Sustainability is creating the birthday cake for Baltimore Inner Harbor’s trash collecting machine, known as Mr. Trash Wheel, to celebrate Earth Day.

An initiative implemented by the Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore, Mr. Trash Wheel is a trash interceptor that sits and collects trash flowing into Baltimore’s Inner Harbor from the Jones Falls river.

Every year, Mr. Trash Wheel has a birthday “cake” made for him out of trash collected from various places in the Baltimore area. Students can help turn the trash into the trash cake from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. in Freedom Square.

This year, the trash was collected by Towson students through Impact TU. Last Saturday, students collected litter around campus and in neighboring communities. Beth Schap, the sustainability outreach coordinator at Towson, introduced the idea to the Waterfront Partnership.

“Litter is still a problem in, you know, our world, but also in Baltimore and Maryland, and even here on campus sometimes,” Schap said. “I’ve seen worse litter problems on other campuses, but we do still sometimes have some litter.”

“[Schap] comes to a lot of the trash wheel events, and I think she was trying to figure out a way to get the students at Towson involved,” Chelsea Anspach said, senior manager of outreach and engagement at the Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore. 

The event is designed for Towson students to learn about sustainability and to generate thoughts about habits that can lead to damage to the local environment, especially single use plastics.

“We’re trying to make students aware of the problem of trash in general, but also about how much of that trash is usually single-use plastics,” Schap said.

The birthday cake will be fed to Mr. Trash Wheel on his birthday, April 25 from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. at the Public Works Experience. Tickets are available both online and at the event.