We were stoked to share the Seabin Project stories about building marina placed trash collectors, but we were really stoked to see that there is already something similar in use right here in Oceanside, CA!
A pair of new skimmers are making it easier to keep the water clean in Oceanside’s municipal harbor, alleviating one of the most frequent complaints from visitors and boat owners: trash and muck in the water.
The machines — installed about two months ago on the south side of the harbor, near popular eateries such as Joe’s Crab Shack — can each remove up to 500 pounds of trash from the water a month, city maintenance workers say. Trash and oils that would collect in the area, after being pushed there by the tides and currents, are trapped by the skimmers, which operate 24 hours a day.
“This area used to be bad,” said Jon Perkins, a maintenance worker scooping trash out of one of machines Friday morning. “We would try and do what we could, but I can’t believe how good it looks now.”
Built by Marina Trash Skimmer, a Billingham, Wa.-based company, the machines look like trash containers — about six feet wide by four feet deep — that float on the water. An electric motor sucks in about 300 gallons of water a minute into the device and filters the water trapping debris, such as paper cups, plastic containers and dead marine plants.Read on and thanks to the UT.
