Meet the Divers Pulling Plastic Off Aqaba's Reef

The Red Sea at Aqaba is, on a good day, a place of quiet astonishment. Sunlight filters through twenty metres of water and breaks into shafts above table corals and sea fans. Parrotfish move unhurried between formations that took centuries to build. Glass-bottom boats drift overhead, offering a window onto a world that has drawn tourists — and sustained local livelihoods — for generations.

But the view is fragile: when waste settles on the reef, it smothers coral and disturbs the animals that depend on it.

Alaa Hasassien grew up in Aqaba and has worked on the water for 18 years as a parasailing captain and water sports instructor. In 2019 he helped form the Blue Team, a group of 14 volunteer divers focused on removing debris from the seabed. “At first it was purely tourism-driven,” he says. “Tourists came, they saw rubbish in the sites, and we felt the need to clean it.” Over repeated dives, the team’s attention shifted from appearances to conservation. They learned techniques to remove debris without breaking fragile coral, and they began to track what they recovered.

Abed Khalifat, a Blue Team member and a diver since 2017, recalls the scale and of those first clean-ups: “One of our first dive we pulled out 55 plastic bags.” The team now records and sorts everything they remove to trace sources. They commonly find single-use plastic items — plastics manufactured to be used once, sometimes for only a few minutes, before being discarded — mainly cups, bags, and wrappers, often near or draped over coral formations.

Once they found a pufferfish – “Nemo” as locals call it – nesting inside a plastic cup.

Their data-backed dives reveal a grim truth echoed by local authorities, a vast majority of the plastic they find in the sea originates on land, pushed to the shore by wind and floods.

The science bears out his concern. Corals grow slowly — roughly a centimeter a year for many species — and damage from smothering or abrasion can take decades to repair. Removing entangled plastic requires careful buoyancy control and steady hands: a single misjudged movement can break what took a generation to form. Blue Team members train specifically for those constraints, emphasising precise, low-impact technique during every clean-up dive.

Back in Aqaba, the divers describe what a steady flow of plastic looks like up close. Beyond the physical damage to coral, single-use items alter the behaviour of marine life. Alaa and his colleagues describe fish nesting near or inside plastic objects, and animals trapped in bottles or cut containers. These are not isolated anecdotes; they are consistent with what the volunteers retrieve on every dive. The team’s conclusion is unequivocal: the most effective intervention is stopping single-use plastics from reaching the coast in the first place.

Plastic Travels by Wind and Floods

Nasser Zwaidah, manager of the Aqaba Marine Reserve under the Aqaba Special Economic Zone Authority (ASEZA), has matched grassroots urgency with institutional action. ASEZA now runs outreach in schools and universities, enforces fines for littering, and is working to phase alternatives into the local market – encouraging glass, cardboard, and paper over single-use plastics. “Plastic travels by wind and floods,” he says.  “Plastic bags, in particular, can suffocate corals by blocking light and closing its pores.”

Clean-up campaigns in 2024 removed tens of tonnes of material, and ASEZA reports declining waste volumes in some monitored sites. But Zwaidah is candid about the limits of what clean-ups alone can achieve: demand for single-use items, he says, must fall.

Progress is real but partial. Enforcement, alternative products, public awareness and education, and continued monitoring are all part of the solution — and none of them works without the others. Single-use plastics remain standard in everything from neighbourhood corner shops to large supermarkets, cheap to produce and easy to distribute. While they may be used for a few minutes, they can remain in the environment for hundreds of years.

Alaa knows he cannot clean his way to a healthy reef. The work matters — the Blue Team’s dives protect coral that would otherwise be smothered — but it is, at best, damage limitation. What he asks of people is simpler than a dive certification: use fewer disposable items, bring a reusable container, secure your rubbish on a windy day. “One of the most direct ways people can help protect the Red Sea,” he says, “is by reducing their use of single-use plastics — because much of what ends up here starts on land.”

Beneath the glass-bottom boats, the reef is still there — the parrotfish, the sea fans, the slow patient coral. Whether the view it offers in ten years shows living colour or grey debris depends less on what happens underwater than on the choices made, daily, far from the shore.