Diver Richard Nicolls inspired a worldwide movement out of collecting ocean rubbish
Yachts bob on the water, the sun is shining down and Manly Cove looks like paradise. But go under the water between the wharf and the former Ocean World, and you’ll find tonnes of plastic rubbish, says Manly local Richard Nicholls.
“When I first started diving (at Manly Cove) in the late 1980s, there really wasn’t plastic rubbish in the ocean. There was a very small amount of rubbish, but almost nothing. And then over time, that increased,” Richard says.
He retired last year, having owned and run Dive Centre Manly for 32 years. Richard started diving as a young man in the UK and immigrated to Australia in 1983 as a golf professional. During a stint of travelling he took a job running a snorkelling business on a cruise liner, after which he worked in Fiji as a diving instructor, before returning to Australia and settling on the Northern Beaches.
It was during his dives in and around Manly that he started to pick up the rubbish he saw. “Instead of swimming past something, we’d just pick it up,” he recalls. At the time, he started taking groups diving in areas that weren’t traditionally popular dive sites, like around Little Manly and inside the harbour at Fairlight. “And we started to find quite a lot of rubbish, particularly in Manly Cove, where the southerly wind had brought it all across.
“Then we made it a bit more formal and we gave the instructors little catch bags to pick up rubbish.” Richard says people would ask for their own bags, and in time it grew. “There was a great enthusiasm for cleaning up. I was quite surprised at the response and how good it made people feel.”
So Richard decided to formalise it with an event where underwater rubbish was collected every quarter – which evolved into the Dive Against Debris initiative.
Over time, the Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI) put together a centralised database to study the underwater waste. It was from here that other dive centres around Australia, and then the world, took on the initiative and started recording all of their rubbish results to the PADI Aware Foundation. “It was the first definitive study of underwater waste,” Richard says.
Now, more than 6,600 dive shops participate and the total pieces of debris recorded annually now surpass two million. Dive Against Debris is now the world’s largest citizen science marine project.
Richard with rubbish collected on a dive
“(In Manly), we tend to focus on the plastic because that’s our biggest problem. But I have seen it change,” Richard says. “There are less plastic bags now than before. There are definitely less straws. But the thing that’s on the rise now is vaping products.”
Richard also names fishing waste like lines, sinkers and bait containers as a common find, as well as dog poo bags.
One of his strangest finds was a bag belonging to an inmate from a goal in NSW.
“There was a great enthusiasm for cleaning up. I was quite surprised at the response and how good it made people feel.”
Richard received a PADI lifetime achievement award in November last year, one of only eight people across the world to receive the honour for his diving achievements.
He was also involved in the successful push to make Cabbage Tree Bay a no-take aquatic reserve, meaning nothing can be removed from the water. That was 21 years ago. “(The change) has been amazing,” Richard says. “We knew it’d be a fantastic thing for the whole community. Not just divers, but snorkellers and swimmers (too).”
To join in a Dive Against Debris, visit divesydney.com.au
