Clintonville teen earns patent for invention helping to keep garbage off the streets

WOSU 89.7 NPR News | By Allie Vugrincic

Published April 4, 2023 at 1:05 PM EDT

Damian Earley, 17, pushes his family trash can off the Garbage Lot, a weighted platform that locks onto the axel of the trash can to keep it from tipping over, in the driveway of his Clintonville home. Earley, a junior at Whetstone High School, invented the Garbage Lot in eighth grade for the Invention Convention competition and won a patent for it when he competed at the national level a year later. He received the patent in March.

Damian Earley has something that most 17-year-olds don’t: a patent for his invention.

Damian, who is a junior at Whetstone High School, invented a device to keep trash cans from tipping over.

The platform has a small ramp on one end and a paddle mechanism that hooks onto the back of a trash can and can be released with a foot peddle.

“So, the trash bin, you can just pull it up the ramp, and it goes onto the platform, which will be filled with sand or water to weigh it down, Damian said.

The prototype is wooden and painted bright yellow, though Damian said if he had his choice of materials, the device would be made of recycled plastic, maybe even the vinyl scraps from his father’s record store.

Damian earned the patent for his invention, which he calls the Garbage Lot, in ninth grade, after advancing to the national level of Invention Convention, a K-12 invention program. He started that round of the competition in eighth grade.

His marketing slogan is “The Garbage Lot. Your garbage bin’s parking spot.”

But why does an 8th grader decide to tackle tipping trash? Damian said he was sick of seeing garbage all over the alleyway in his Clintonville neighborhood.

“So of course, I had to create a solution for it because I'm the one cleaning it up in the alley,” he said.

But it’s not just the alley he’s worried about.

“There’s so much garbage that gets dumped into the streets, dumped into rivers. And so, cleaning the environment is obviously a very important part of the entire invention,” Damian said.

Damian Earley, 17, poses with the device he invented as it locks onto his family's trash can to keep it from tipping in the driveway of his Clintonville home.

Only a handful of competitors at Invention Convention win a patent award each year. Damian's patent, a $25,000 process, was funded through General Motors and drawn up by a law firm in Michigan. After years in the making, he finally received the patent in March.

His mom, Lisa Earley, said it’s been an amazing journey. She added that inventing was right up Damian’s alley, no pun intended.

“He's always tinkered with Legos and magna tiles and loved to build and create and has always been imaginative,” Lisa said.

Damian’s journey as an inventor formally started back in second grade.

“There was an assembly where the two spokespeople for Invention Convention, Professor Prototype and Captain Gadget, came to my elementary school, and I got so pumped up and excited, I started to join when I could in third grade,” he said.

His first invention was a drone network powered by phone app that would deliver prescription drugs to the homebound. He never made a prototype of that invention and can’t remember exactly what inspired him.

“…but I knew that it was a problem, and I knew that there had to be a solution,” Damian said.

He competed in Invention Convention again in fourth and fifth grade, designing a robot butler to take care of pets and then a glove to extend fingerings on a piano. He even built the glove, using Legos.

“I've been playing piano for a long time and never been quite good. I have small hands and I couldn't reach the octave, so I decided that I had to make something that could help me out,” Damian said. He added, “My playing is still quite meh, but it did help. And it was it was fun to use.”

In addition to piano, Damian plays cello and runs cross country and track. Most importantly, school is his full-time job, he said.

Damian isn’t the only inventor in his family. His siblings, Elena, 14, and Zavier, 11, have also participated in Invention Convention. They haven’t received patents, but they have both made it to the national competition.

“So yeah. It runs in the family now,” Damian said.

Lisa Earley is a math specialist at an elementary school. She said that while she’s always a mom first, she’s also been “teacher mom” from day one, trying to give them opportunities and lead them in the direction of things that they're excited about.

She said she hopes that Damian’s patent will lead to an internship and help him get into and pay for college.

Damian wants to sell his idea to someone who can get the Garbage Lot on the market. He plans on talking to local trash pickup companies.

Damian says he couldn’t have gotten this far without the support of his parents, Sarah Priebe, a sixth-grade English teacher from Dominion Middle School, and of course, Abby Fisher, also known as Professor Prototype of Ohio Invention League, one of the characters who started it all.

In the future, Damian wants to go into structural or civil engineering.

And he says he’s done inventing, at least for now.

Damian Earley, 17, uses a foot paddle to release the family trash can from the Garbage Lot, a weighted platform he invented to keep the can from tipping.