May 25, 2021 — Greg Pimentel and Shay Ribeiro bent over a folding table set on the dock at Pier 3. Covering it was a brown pile of organic matter speckled with the bright, artificial colors of plastic.
For more than one hour, they sorted with gloved hands through multiple piles counting cigarette butts, food wrappers, plastic fragments and other pieces of human waste. When they were done, they dumped everything into a barrel.
“If more people took care or properly disposed of trash, we would only have organic material here,” Pimentel, director of community outreach at the Community Boating Center, said.
The material they pulled came from the trash skimmer first installed in 2019. For 24 hours a day, seven days a week, the floating box gobbles up harbor water and all its detritus.
The skimmer is named Walley and much like the Pixar robot, Wall-E, that cleans Earth one piece of trash at a time, the water skimmer sucks up human waste to make the New Bedford Harbor a bit cleaner.