It has been a year since the New South Wales government banned lightweight plastic bags, leading to a significant 71 per cent drop in plastic bag litter.
Despite this progress, experts call for more work addressing the plastic waste problem.
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On today’s episode of This Arvo In Sydney, we spoke to Pete Ceglinski, the CEO of Seabin, a company that cleans waste out of Sydney Harbour, to reveal how much rubbish is in Sydney’s waterways.
The Australian company has placed 32 large filters in the water, removing more than 100 tonnes of micro-plastics, plastic fibres, and marine litter.
It’s not the end of the list of single-use disposable items, and we’re looking to the State government to do more,”
Mr Ceglinski said.
One of the big ones on the horizon are single-use plastic coffee cups; cigarette butts are a very big problem with billions of those, they’re very toxic, and they are made out of plastic,”
he said.
The company has been tracking the origin of waste using unusual data sources like parking tickets.
The unique thing about the parking tickets is that we know where it’s come from because, on the parking ticket, it has the date and time of an offence,”
he added.
The data reveals that 98 per cent of parking tickets originate from the CBD and nearby areas, such as Haymarket, Darlinghurst, Surry Hills, Paddington, Bellevue Hill, and Rose Bay.
All the chats I’ve had over the years, the city and other people are always blaming it on the Parramatta River. Out of 136 parking tickets we are collecting, only two per cent came from the Parramatta River.”
Hosted by Sacha Barbour, This Arvo in Sydney is a 10 to 12 minute daily news podcast made just for Sydney! Listen now on the Listnr app.