Page 106 - EarthHeroes

Each device can collect up to 20 kilograms of waste a day, which means it can remove up to 90,000 plastic bags, or 37,500 disposable cups, or 16,500 plastic bottles from the water every year. Today, there are over 860 Seabins in more than 48 countries, each collecting on average three kilograms
of waste a day. This is a lot of rubbish, especially when you consider that the most common items are lightweight – cigarette butts, small bits of plastic and food wrappers. In total, that’s nearly two tonnes of waste collected each day from the sea. The strangest thing Pete has ever seen caught in a Seabin is a cowboy boot with a mini-pineapple inside. And once he found a $20 note!
While Seabins benefit everyone by
helping to clean our oceans, they are
expensive to make and cost around
£3,500 each to buy. However, there are many
communities joining together to pay for them. The
port of Dublin, in Ireland, got its first Seabin in 2018 after
11-year-old Flossie Donnelly raised money by holding a disco,
a quiz and a crowdfunding campaign. The Seabin team were so impressed
with her efforts that they gave her two! In early 2019, 13-year-old surfer Archie Mandin raised nearly $20,000 to pay for the first Seabins in the marinas near his home in Pittwater, Australia.
Pete continues to improve the Seabin design. As well as larger items, it can now filter out oil and microplastics more than two millimetres in size. He wants future Seabins to be able to trap microfibres too. The team hope that in future it will be possible to recycle the plastic their Seabins collect to make new Seabins, and they aim to have Seabins in the open ocean by 2027.
Pete and Andrew know that Seabins aren’t the answer to the ocean plastic problem. The real solution is education. For this reason, they put half the money that they make into a charity called the Seabin Foundation, which teaches children about reducing plastic use, recycling and using science, technology and
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