(WSVN) - A South Florida man got so tired of seeing garbage around his dock, he decided to take matters into his hands and take out the trash. 7’s Alex Browning hits the water in our 7 Spotlight.
Who wouldn’t love to wake up to this view every morning? But sometimes, that view isn’t as beautiful as it could be.
Kevin O’Neill: “Lots of Styrofoam, some bits of plastic, a bottle cap, a food wrapper.”
Kevin O’Neill may be retired, but he’s keeping busy, cleaning up the canals in his Fort Lauderdale neighborhood.
Kevin O’Neill: “I kept coming out and looking at all the trash that kept showing up in the canal. I figured, ‘OK, let me see if I can do something.'”
His research led him to an Australian company that makes a machine called a Seabin. It’s designed to pull trash and other debris out of waterways.
Kevin O’Neill: “So it kind of acts like a pool skimmer, and it’s got a pump inside it. It will actually go below the water surface, pull in the trash, which gets captured by the net, and pop out.”
Getting a Seabin from Australia to South Florida was harder than expected. The machines are primarily built for use at marinas, not docks along canals.
Kevin eventually tracked down three of them at the University of Florida, sitting in storage after being used in a study on marine conservation.
Maia McGuire, University of Florida: “They were actually designed to be used at marinas. In Kevin’s case, he’s had to kind of retrofit his dock to add a floating dock to it so that he could house the Seabin there.”
So in the end, Kevin forked out about $5,000 to build this floating dock and installed the Seabin back in November. So far, he’s collected more than 200 pounds of trash.
Kevin O’Neill: “Lots of cigar tips, that’s a pretty common bit that I see a lot. Lots of various sizes of Styrofoam. The amount of plastics, that surprised me a bit, particularly on the days when the water is clean.”
The trash scooped out is logged, and the data is sent to UF.
The info is used by researchers there to spread the word about how that trash could have eventually ended up in the ocean.
Maia McGuire: “And, hopefully, motivating people to look for ways that they personally can reduce their contributions to the problem.”
Kevin O’Neill: “There’s a lid, candy wrapper, bit of a Styrofoam plate, that looks like there, some more wrappers.”
Kevin hopes his hard work will inspire his neighbors to get involved in keeping their canal clean, even without the help of a Seabin.
Kevin O’Neill: “I think everyone expects someone else to clean it up, it’s someone else’s problem. It’s all of us that are contributing to what’s in there. I’m trying to like, you know, leave the world a better place than what you found it.”
A man on a mission, with hopes his retirement project will create a wake across Fort Lauderdale.
Alex Browning, 7News.
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