What do with harmful plastics in our water? Put them in the Seabin
Ingenious machine will remove dangerous waste and oil from coastal waters
Adevice which can collect harmful plastics and even discarded oil is to be used in Scotland for the first time as part of the fight against growing levels of dangerous waste in the waters around our coast.
The ingenious machine – called a Seabin – which will be installed in Banff harbour in April, places a pump below a mesh bag which sits on the water.
Water and debris are then sucked down with waste material left in the bag.
The potential catch equates to around 50,000 plastic water bottles a year or more than 30,000 paper cups, as well as oil floating on the surface or micro plastics down to 2mm in diameter.
The installation at Banff, by Aberdeenshire Council, has the backing of KIMO UK, an Aberdeenshire- based environmental organisation linking local authorities around the coast of the North Sea.
Faron McLellan, the coordinator for KIMO UK, which runs the Fishing For Litter scheme that has seen trawlers collect 1400 tonnes of debris from the sea since 2005, said: “Seabins are a fantastic, low- cost way to help remove marine litter from the sea.
“The concept fits in well with our Fishing For Litter scheme and once this first Seabin has been installed in Banff, we at KIMO UK are looking into using our nearby Fishing For Litter skip at Macduff to dispose of the litter collected.
“Even at this early stage, we have had great interest from other Fishing For Litter harbours and we are currently sourcing new funding to cover the initial purchase and installation costs of additional units.”
At Banff the Seabin, which costs around £ 3000, will be bolted on to a pontoon so it can move up and down with the tidal range, collecting up to 20kg of waste at a time.
Australian surfers Pete Ceglinski and Andrew Turton began developing the Seabin in 2015 after becoming fed up of the amount of debris in the water. The bins are now being produced in France and installed in countries across the world.
The amount of plastic in the world’s oceans has been creating growing concer n in recent months, especially since the BBC series Blue Planet II.
More than 10 million tonnes of plastic is thought to enter the sea each year, causing harm to marine animals and even ending up being digested by humans after fish have ingested tiny particles, known as micro plastics.