In July 2020, clean tech startup Seabin Project, backed by thousands of community members and local businesses, self-funded a world first city pilot to monitor the health of the waterways, and clean up the plastic pollution in Sydney Harbour, Australia. After installing Seabin units (floating garbage bin) across Sydney Harbour, the team began seeing and recording parking tickets captured mong the Seabin catch marine litter.

With an array of degradation, some tickets were legible enough to begin recording details. This presented Seabin Project with a unique opportunity to track the location and time of litter items to be captured in the Seabin Smart Tech (SST).

The Sealife Aquarium unit recorded the highest volume and frequency of parking tickets, predominantly from the City of Sydney Local Government Area (LGA). On average, 48 days passed between point (day and time) of origin to point of capture. Therefore, parking tickets spent on average 48 days in the environment before being captured by SST.

Surry Hills and Haymarket suburbs indicated the highest recorded frequencies of parking tickets caught in Darling Harbour.