Everyday more and more trash flows into our oceans. Hopefully the dark days of expelling raw sewage into the sea are well and truly over now, but past years of neglect means that the water surrounding the lands we live on are far from pristine. For surfers who play in the ocean at every chance they get, seeing foil chip bags, plastic bags and aluminum cans floating round in the surf with you is a real bummer. And that’s exactly what surfers Andrew Turton and Pete Ceglinski thought too. So they invented something that would help to take the trash out of our oceans.
Any invention that helps to keep our seas clean is a good one, and the new Seabin is one of them. Its simple design makes it so surprising that this sort of thing hasn’t been thought of before. The two Aussies who invented it are no strangers to creating things, one is a boat builder and the other an industrial designer. They both worked nearby to marinas and couldn’t help but notice how heavily polluted these bodies of water were. So they figured out a way to fix it.
The Seabin is best suited for marinas and other calm water areas where it can be fixed in place to a sea wall or a floating dock. It kind of looks like an ordinary bin, a large cylindrical container, but with a pipe that extends out of the bottom and up to the surface, like a snorkel. That pipe is fitted to a pump that pulls the water out from inside the Seabin and then back into the nearby body of water. As water is drawn into the Seabin so is trash, but the natural fibre bag within the Seabin catches the trash. All that is left to do then is empty the bin each day! Watch it in action…
One of the best things about the Seabin is that it can operate around the clock, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Besides from occasional pump maintenance, it just needs to be emptied each day, and in 24 hours this baby can collect around 1.5 kilograms of sea garbage. That’s a whopping half tonne each year, and that’s just for one of these bins. Turton and Ceglinski are really passionate about their new invention, as you can see…
Having raised almost $270,000 with an Indiegogo campaign last month, the pair look set to start production of the Seabin shortly. If you work at a marina or know somebody who does, make sure that they know about the Seabin. Spreading awareness is key to getting this type of technology adopted across the world. Head over to the Seabin Project website to stay posted on all the news and find out what these guys have planned.