Hundreds of Seabins across the world but Australia isn’t catching on

It’s the amazing floating rubbish bin that captures all kinds of surprising rubbish. Now, the product’s co-founder wants it to go nationwide.

The co-founder of floating rubbish collector, the Seabin, is calling on the government to roll the ingenious invention out across the country.

Pete Ceglinski says just as there are bins on the land, there should be bins in the water.

There are now 860 Seabins in 52 countries but only 52 of those are in Australia.

Each bin captures an average of 4kg per day or 1.4 tonnes per year.

Across the Seabins around the world, that’s 3600kg of marine litter per day, with microplastics the most commonly caught item, followed by cigarette butts and plastic packaging.

But Mr Ceglinski said there had been “minimal interest or traction” on a local, state or federal government level because the company was still in its early stages.

“And when there is interest, it’s from us going to them to get involved,” he told news.com.au.

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One of the Seabins in action showing the rubbish it has collected. Picture: John Appleyard

“We have a few small Seabin pilots going, which we are extremely excited about, as we work towards an end goal of creating legislation to address marine litter.

“Waterways, as it turns out, is a tricky situation with council jurisdiction ending at the water’s edge and then its Roads and Maritime Services’ responsibility up to the high-tide line, and the litter that enters the waterways becomes the problem of a port or marina that it ends up in, forcing the marina to pay the clean-up and disposal costs of the litter that floated in from upstream.”

News.com.au has launched the series What a Waste to coincide with Planet Ark’s National Recycling Week, highlighting the impact single-use plastics have on the environment and encouraging readers to reduce their personal waste.

Mr Ceglinski said the company was working on a pilot proposal with the Port of San Diego in California to provide all marinas with free, state-funded Seabins and two service contractors to look after the units.

“This is something we would like to do here in Australia and the rest of the world,” he said.

“While state and Australia Government interest has been low, we do a have a few small items in the works.”

They have eight Seabins lined up with state government projects at Rose Bay, Port Macquarie and Brunswick Heads in NSW, and five along the Yarra River’s edge in Docklands, Melbourne.

Other units have been funded by private sales to marinas and yachts clubs, or crowdfunded by school kids.

“We have found that there is a trend now in corporate sponsors coming forward and this is really helping bridge the gap in sales from the private sector as it transitions into government,” Mr Ceglinski said.

“In the lead-up to the elections, we had a few politicians approach us to buy Seabins in the hope of getting more votes, yet nothing eventuated from that.

“Currently, Seabin Project survive on sales of Seabins to pay our bills and have had to get extremely creative with our marketing to apply pressure from local communities to speak with their councils.

“But regardless of state government involvement, we are in the black and starting to look at our first series A funding round to bring on board some proper seed capital to scale up our operations and make bigger more energy efficient Seabins for greater impact.”

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