Sydney Harbour rubbish loads rise during Vivid, Seabin claims

Projections are played over the sails of the Sydney Opera House during the Vivid Festival. (Reuters: David Gray) Link copiedShareShare articleThe creators behind floating rubbish bins peppered around Sydney Harbour claim rubbish loads rise during the Vivid Sydney arts festival. About 20 bins located in bays and marinas near the city's CBD collect waste including microplastics from the surface of the harbour. Seabin chief executive and co-founder Pete Ceglinski said six years of data showed plastic pollution in the harbour spiked during major events. "At Christmas we start to see more fake grass, but it's from the plastic Christmas trees," he said. "Chinese New Year comes around we see fireworks paraphernalia ... and Mardi Gras we see more glitter in the water." Seabin chief executive and co-founder Pete Ceglinski at Sydney Harbour. (Supplied: Seabin) Mr Ceglinski said large crowds during longer events like Vivid, which runs for three weeks, could have contributed to the amount of rubbish being seen. "More humans, more rubbish," Mr Ceglinksi said. Vivid, which started on Friday, is considered Australia's biggest festival and attracts crowds of more than 2 million people across May and June. Events are held across different venues in the CBD and light installations draw crowds to a number of sites including harbour locations such as the Opera House. Reporting on the volume of rubbish it collected in the harbour, Seabin found more plastic items captured in the bins during last year's festival than the year before, despite having deployed fewer bins. The number of bins in the harbour decreased from 32 in 2024 to 20 in 2025. But a similar weight of marine litter was still collected and individual plastic items doubled during the 2025 Vivid festival compared with the same period of time the previous year. Microplastics also went up by 19 per cent. Meanwhile, festival attendance went up slightly from 2.42 million in 2024 to 2.53 million in 2025. RMIT University environmental scientist Scott Wilson, who was not involved with the Seabin report, said the results showed an increase in plastic loads between Vivid 2024 and 2025. "This appears to be in line with increasing visitation over the same period," he said. "However, the analysis would be further aided by the use of data from outside of the Vivid influenced locations. Similarly, data comparisons could be made with rainfall patterns over the period. "Both these would help in teasing out what may be coming from the Sydney CBD at this time compared to a broader regional level of input and whether there were any weather derived differences between the comparative periods." An aquatic bin situated in Sydney Harbour draws in plastic rubbish. (Supplied: Seabin) Rubbish can get into the harbour from direct littering but also via street waste that gets washed in from stormwater drains. That means more rubbish and plastic winds up in the harbour after major rainfall events. Spikes in plastic pollution captured by Seabin around Vivid in 2024 and 2025 coincided with high periods of monthly rainfall. Dr Wilson said the report also showed that while some types of plastics, such as microplastics, collected during Vivid 2025 were higher than Vivid 2024, they were lower than the previous month. Seabin's pollution index — which applies a pollution ranking out of 11 based on how many litres of water are filtered relative to plastic collected — was set at five for Vivid in the past two years. Dr Wilson said the index score was also the same for the month prior to Vivid in 2025 suggesting pollution levels were similar before the festival. But, he said, there appeared to be increases in some types of litter items that could be attributed to large crowds from the event. "There are obvious increases in certain litter items, possibly even accounting for differences in weather and general harbour inputs, during the Vivid period that could only be attributed to the sheer numbers of people visiting the CBD at this time." Mr Ceglinski said Seabin had gone to the state government department that organises Vivid, Destination NSW, to ask for funding for extra bins and form a partnership during the festival period. "We offered to do it for free for the month of the festival and they rejected that as well," Mr Ceglinski said. "This year I got an email they're not going to go ahead with any support or partnership with us. They're going to focus on their internal waste footprint." But Mr Ceglinski thought the organisers and city planners needed to do more about the rubbish items brought by people who attended the festival. He wanted to see more real-time environmental monitoring related to attendee impacts and more planning and spending to mitigate marine pollution. A rainbow of plastic objects and wrappers are collected from Sydney Harbour every day. (Supplied: Seabin) A Destination NSW spokesperson said Vivid Sydney continued to evolve its sustainability measures

Sydney Harbour rubbish loads rise during Vivid, Seabin claims

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