Every industry has its waste product, some waste more visible than others. While the lobster industry is considered more green than most, it does have one obvious byproduct that shows up on Maine shores and yards: the broken lobster trap.
Big, bulky and often useless, the broken traps sometimes break free from tethers and wash up on beaches. Others find permanent retirement on grassy lawns near the sea. Transfer stations now often charge for the traps, and they usually are too bulky to haul away for scrap.
“You’re hauling away a bunch of air,” said Chebeague Island’s resident scrapman Kim Boehm.
But Boehm has devised a way to crunch the traps down to size and haul them off them off the island for a tiny profit. He’s created a mini-compactor, dubbed “Trapzilla”, to crush the traps from 48 inches down to just 8 inches. He hopes to entice the island’s lobstermen to bring their retired traps to Trapzilla and rid the island of the eyesore of excessive, rusty traps.
A born tinkerer, Boehm says it took three dreams to devise the device.
“I do my best thinking at three o’clock in the morning,” he said.
It took some 40 hours this winter to build Trapzilla. Boehm, owner of Island Electric, typically is busy during the fall with electrical work on Chebeague, but January was a down time that allowed him to create Trapzilla in his shop.
Boehm says he took the existing design for aluminum-compactor crushing and appropriated it for a machine to crush traps. He describes the compactor as a cage made up of short scrap I-beams with a plunger-like device in the middle. The hydraulics are powered by a gasoline engine and the whole device can be put on a trailer.
“It’s kind of like a kitchen compactor on steroids,” Boehm said.
He makes sure the traps are free of bricks and debris. Once crushed, the traps are tucked into scrap cars to ship to the mainland.
No stranger to crushed scrap metal, Boehm has been unofficially in charge of much of the scrap car removal on the island.
“Anytime a car is dying or dead, it finds its way to me,” he said.
A longtime resident on the island, Boehm quickly noticed there were few places free of scrap cars. One property owner near his land had 40 dead cars, he said. At the time, the island was still part of the town of Cumberland, but Boehm says there was little interest from the mainland government to help haul away the cars.
A friend with a gravel pit asked Boehm for help to remove cars dumped at the pit. Boehm contacted a man with a compactor who said he would have to find at least 100 cars for the compactor to come out; he found more than 200. For his work, Boehm received an environmental award from the Baldacci gubernatorial administration.
But it is more than altruism that powers Boehm’s quest to crush metal. He has a natural affinity to the destruction, recycling and reshaping of metal and machines.
By the time Boehm was three, by his own description, he was known to take anything apart he could find. By the time he was six, he could take things apart and put them back together, except that he couldn’t get them to work again. By the time he was eight, he could fix what he had taken apart to work again.
It was during this period that Boehm was allowed by his uncle to take apart a broken outboard motor. When he had finished and the pieces were scattered on the ground, his uncle said he would take them to a scrap metal collector and give Boehm the money. The information hit Boehm with the weight of a revelation.
“They’ll pay money for this?” he remembers thinking as a six-year-old. “I get to take something apart, not fix it and they’ll take the parts and pay me for this? This is heaven.”
Since then, Boehm may put down electrician on his tax forms, but tinkering is his calling. By mid-March, Trapzilla only had a few test runs, but lobstermen are already asking for appointments. As the winter snow recedes, Boehm believes his compact compactor will be busy.
Boehm is hoping to share his design with other island communities who face similar challenges with broken traps. He can be reached at islndelt@juno.com. (The “a” is left out of “island” purposely.)