Toronto’s Outer Harbour Marina is attempting to keep waters clean through some new technology they’ve installed called the Seabin.

The Seabin is essentially a floating garbage can, which is a cylindrical container that gets mounted to the side of a dock, sucking in surface garbage from oil and gas spills to micro plastics. The cans lie just below the surface of the water, and they have a pump at the bottom that moves up and down to pull any garbage or debris into a containment bag.
 

Outer Harbour Marina is one of the first locations in Canada to implement Seabins, and it’s running a pilot project with three Seabins. The Seabin was created by two Australian surfers who built a prototype, and set up an Indiegogo page that crowdfunded a whopping $350,000. According to CBC Toronto, since the product landed on the market a year ago, the Seabins have captured approximately 115 tonnes of garbage.

“Being a harbour, debris gathers in the water and we had to manually collect it,” Outer Harbour Marina manager Mike Dwyer explains to CBC Toronto. “But since installing the bins, we’ve noticed a huge difference. They do all the work for us. All we have to do is empty the bag every day.”
 

If the project goes well, the marina intends to install even more bins.
 
Lead photo courtesy of Outer Harbour Marina on Twitter.