For the past 2½ years, Baltimore’s Mr. Trash Wheel has been gobbling up depressing, ugly garbage spewed by a heedless, coarsened populace.

Noting that the 2016 U.S. presidential race has produced a lot of the same lately, some have proposed expanding the mission of the googly-eyed water wheel trash collector.

Could he take a spin through our Facebook and Twitter feeds, cable new networks, smartphones, computers, radios and all our other pipelines of soul-crushing political yuckery and vacuum it up?

Reached at his berth on Pier 5, the anthropomorphized garbage gleaner stayed on message and addressed instead the milestone that his organization announced today:

Mr. Trash Wheel has collected 1 million pounds of trash since May 2014 when he first started scooping up litter washed off city streets that would otherwise end up in the Harbor or Chesapeake Bay.

“It seems like only yesterday I ate my first empty chip bag. With help from humans, I hope to one day announce that I have eaten my last,” Trash Wheel said in a statement released by Adam Lindquist, director of the Waterfront Partnership’s Healthy Harbor Initiative.

Beaucoup Butts

The Waterfront Partnership owns and maintains the solar-powered Mr. Trash Wheel, and the Department of Public Works disposes of the trash it collects.

The Partnership records the amount of trash being collected by Mr. Trash Wheel on a quarterly basis when it receives the data from the device’s inventor, Clearwater Mills.

According to Lindquist, it was during the most recent quarter (ending September 30) that the 1,000,000-lbs. mark was surpassed. (This data can be found at MrTrashWheel.com.)

Using those stats, Lindquist has compiled factoids like this to publicize his garbage-gathering colleague:

“One million pounds, or 500 tons, is equal to the weight of 55 Tyrannosaurus Rexes or about two Statues of Liberty,” he wrote in a release.

“This includes more than 8.5 million cigarette butts that, if lined up end to end, would stretch from Baltimore to Ocean City, MD.”