California inventor working on a bicycle pulled sweeper (2022)
bikeportland.org
bikeportland.org
Even if they don’t have quite the same efficacy or durability as plastic bristles, the ability to put them directly into municipal compost facilities (or urban composting bins) is a huge benefit.
But can it be manufactured consistently enough for engineered use cases like this where bristle length and bristle characteristics might need to be dialed in to get the desired performance?
Perhaps obsessing over that is part of the problem. If it works reasonably well and doesn’t pollute, in the long term (arguably the only term that really matters in this context) then a loss of efficiency is acceptable.
Every way of picking this up has a conceptual downside.
The key is doing something anyway
It will surely generate less microplastic than the similar bristles used on full sized street sweeping machinery.
The question that comes to my mind is: why is there so much debris on the road?