“More than 250 million tons of plastic are estimated to make its way into our ocean by 2025. The environmental damage caused by plastic debris alone is estimated at US$13 billion a year. The AWARE flagship program, Dive Against Debris, improves the health of ocean ecosystems through local action while providing valuable information about underwater debris to help inform policy change for global impact.

Since the program launched in 2011, divers have aided over 35,000 entangled marine animals and reported more than 2.4 million pieces of marine debris to inform groundbreaking research that is helping to create healthier oceans.” - PADI AWARE

At Aqua Dive we have 5 Adopt The Blue sites which we clean on a regular basis to ensure healthy and productive reefs, free from plastic pollution.

Our current mission:

We have actively been doing clean up dives at Aqua Dive since the start, but in November 2024 we ventured out to a rarely-visited coral block on our house reef and were shocked by what we found. Since then we have made it our mission to clean up this section of the reef. If you want to keep updated on our progress, we post all updates here and on our instagram each week.

Clean Up Dives: 17

Debris Weight Removed: 620.9 kg

Pieces of Debris Removed: 8920

How we do it:

Partnering with Atoll Marine Centre and Atoll Volunteers, we run our Dive Against Debris events every Friday afternoon, inviting our wonderful volunteers and visitors to the island to join.

Each week we remove between 30 and 50 kilograms of rubbish out of our ocean and after a few trials we have found that using a lift bag in neutral buoyancy and swimming with it underwater is the easiest way. Luckily our staff and partners are now experts at using a lift bag, making our removals so much easier!