A train ride to or from Mumbai, India, can be wrought with claustrophobic accommodations where any number of your jam-packed fellow riders might indiscriminately toss plastic bottles, wrappers, and other garbage out the windows and onto the passing ground.
But far less trash than you might expect litters the rail line.
Locals haven’t exactly embraced recycling on a mass scale.
Rather, Indian rail officials have unleashed a beast on the discarded waste: the world’s largest and most powerful train vacuum cleaner.
Scheduled to rust away in a scrapyard, the old, un-used engine has been up-cycled into a trash-collecting marvel, according to The Recycle Times.
Prowling like an elephant swinging its trunk to search out and inhale peanuts, the eco-locomotive was conceived by engineers from India’s Central Railway looking for a more efficient (read non-human) way to collect the trash.
Augmenting the decades-long tradition of garbage picker armies marching up and down India's tracks, the scooper has been operational for more than a week on stretches of the central line running between two of the most polluted stations, say officials.
No word on whether the inhaled detritus will be recycled.
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