Throughout the last few decades our irresponsible acts towards the environment is leading to the planet being choked with non-renewable plastic wastes to the brim. The biggest victims in the scenario are the water bodies, especially vast oceans putting the lives of a majority of aquatic organisms at risk. Territorial clean-ups are often taken up as a helpful initiative but ocean clean-ups require skill, manpower and resources which we don’t delve in to use to rectify our own mistakes. Due to our actions, countless sea creatures are washed up on the shore suffering from plastic contamination. According to estimates from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), 8 million tons of plastic is dumped in the oceans every year and a simple glimpse in the situation around us leads us to the conclusion that no one is tempted to bother about the deadly problem.
In an attempt to start the marathon for making things right, the group of Dixie Divers and Woman’s club of Deerfield Beach organised a massive underwater clean-up on June 15 at the Deerfield Beach International Fishing Pier in Florida. The group was sponsored by Project AWARE and PADI, the Professional Association of Diving Instructors. The group of 633 divers set a Guinness world record for ‘most participants in an underwater clean-up in 24 hours’. The team recovered 3200 pounds of discarded fishing gear and 9000 pieces of marine debris comprising of trash and plastic waste from the ocean floor. The collected debris is now being sorted into recyclable and non-recyclable products for the future. The group conducts such events annually, and this marks their 15th annual clean-up event. The clean-up was covered in less than two hours, which surpassed the earlier record of an Egyptian diving group attempting a massive underwater clean-up in 2015. It is a sincere hope that more people are inspired by such events and come forward to take part in the future to rescue the planet from destruction.
