This September, we're proud to be donating $5,000 to Seabin as part of our Charitable Giving program.
It feels like a fitting one to shout about this month, too - Seabin is celebrating 10 years in the water, and we're celebrating 10 years of our own. Two Australian-founded businesses hitting the same milestone in the same month, both started by people who looked at a problem in their own backyard and decided to just get on with fixing it.
Seabin is an Australian clean-tech company that's been working to pull plastic out of the world's marinas and waterways since 2016. It started with two mates, Andrew Turton and Pete Ceglinski, who'd spent years surfing and sailing around the world and got sick of swimming through rubbish. So they built a floating bin that could do something about it - a small, practical idea that's since grown into a program running in dozens of countries under the banner "100 Smarter Cities for Cleaner Oceans."
The need is significant. Since July 2020, the Seabins stationed around Sydney Harbour have filtered more than 42 billion litres of water and removed over 31 million plastic items and 18 million microplastics - with microplastics making up 55% of everything collected. Most ocean plastic isn't the big, visible stuff. It's fragments and fibres too small to spot from a boat, and by the time they're in the harbour, they're already impossible to clean up by hand.
Where your support goes
If you'd like to support Seabin on top of our monthly donation, you can find out more about their work and how to get involved at seabin.io.
Our $5,000 donation funds 18.7 million litres of water filtered, 10,000 plastic items captured, and 5.4 million microplastics removed from Sydney Harbour.
Numbers aside, what makes Seabin's approach work is where it sits - right at the source. Marinas and ports are where a lot of ocean plastic first enters the water, so catching it there, before it ever reaches open ocean, means less ends up drifting further out where it's harder to reach and does more damage to marine life.
The Partnership
Seabin's units work like a floating pool skimmer, plumbed into a shore-based pump that draws water in 24 hours a day, filters out rubbish, oil and detergents through a catch bag, and pumps clean water back out. No fish or marine life caught in the process - just the debris. Sydney Harbour now has a network of these units working around the clock, and Seabin uses the data they collect to understand what's actually ending up in our waterways and where it's coming from.
Why Seabin?
Our mission at Seed & Sprout has always centred on doing less harm and more good, for people and planet alike. Seabin's approach lines up with a lot of what we're already trying to do in the kitchen and bathroom - stopping plastic and microplastics at the source, before they ever get the chance to reach the ocean. Supporting a partner tackling the same problem from the water side wasn't a hard call - and doing it while we're both marking 10 years in business felt like the right way to celebrate.
The Impact
Every litre filtered and every plastic item captured is one less thing breaking down into microplastics in the harbour. Multiply that across every Seabin unit running around Sydney and beyond, and you start to see how this incredible piece of tech, left running quietly in the background, adds up to something substantial.
If you'd like to learn more about the work Seabin does, we'd love for you to check it out.
