Swag-It

by Phil Rowe
Whilst watching a television newscast a while back about medical waste being washed up on New Jersey beaches, I was motivated to create a simple low-cost device to facilitate cleaning that debris in a safe manner. Certainly people would not want to handle the contaminated stuff, including tainted cloth, syringes, swabs and the like. But then people often don't wish to pick up messing things found on our beaches, roadsides and alleys.

I wanted to create a device which would perform the combined functions of sweeping up and bagging the debris on the ground. It would be a combination long-handled dustpan and bag holder. Thus the device was dubbed "Swag-It" for sweep and bag it.

It was a truly simple design, consisting of a bent piece of metal tubing, a flat sheet of metal or plastic, and a few spring clips. The long handle allows users to collect debris while standing and not have to repeatedly bend over to manually pick the stuff up. The dust pan feature would allow debris to be swept into the attached bag easily and simply. And the bags could be of any common size used for trash, garbage or leaves.

Several SWAG-IT units were made, with the help of a local fabricator, and demonstrated to various potential re-sellers. Janitorial supply folks were apparently interested, and indeed offered some minor design improvement suggestions.

A North Dakota wholesaler eventually purchased the rights to the product and agreed to pay both a modest up-front fee for rights plus a modest royalty fee for all units sold.

Unfortunately for us both, the wholesaler was soon presented with information about a competing product and that owner's patent. Though the products were of quite different design and made of different materials, that potential conflict dissuaded the wholesaler from pursuing the idea further. SWAG-IT simply died as a commercial venture.