Atlanta Magnet Man Trawls Nails off the Streets With His Bike Trailer

Alex Benigno has been going around Atlanta, Georgia with the admirable mission of removing dangerous refuse, like screws and nails, from thoroughfares. It's a quintessential "not all heroes wear capes" situation.

I discovered Benigno as @atlantamagnetman on Instagram, where he's built a bit of a following and seems to keep a genuinely appreciative fanbase for his noble pursuits in recreational street cleaning. He's also put some serious creative energy into his homebrewed trash collection technology, which is fun to see. As Benigno himself described his enterprise on the Clover Club podcast: "I pull a trailer behind my bicycle, I put magnets on the bottom, and I use it to pick up nails and screws so our tires won't have to." Sounds like a great community service to me.

I dropped Benigno a message on Instagram and he said he'd be down to chat, but I haven't heard back from him in a bit. In fairness, I rarely spelunk into my "requests" inbox either. Luckily for me and anyone else curious about this one-man quest to clean up Atlanta's streets (sounds like a Robocop sequel logline), he did a nice little interview on the above-linked podcast.

It's a slightly meandering conversation between neighbors (the show host lives near Mr. Benigno) and you can skip to 07:45 if you must get straight to trash-collecting stories. But I found the whole episode to be pretty entertaining.

The guy comes across as very conscientious and creative; it makes sense that such a person would build a cool contraption like this magnetic road-cleaning bike trailer. "I have some ADHD projects that I'll just wander into," he says on the show.

As for this project itself, it seems to be a large trailer (hard to imagine a bicycle towing anything much bigger) with big strips of magnets that pull metallic objects off the pavement and into their invisible clutches. They're neodymium magnets, which I've learned are "the strongest kind of permanent magnet commercially available." A wide push-broom brush helps guide errant road flotsam to the magnets.

In addition to an Instagram, it looks like the ATLMM also set up a casual YouTube channel, which provides some good visuals on how his pedal-powered street sweeper works: