Microplastics and Diving: Your 2021 Ocean Resolution

Every January, dive shops up and down the country fill up with people making the same promise to themselves: this is the year they finally learn to dive, or finally get back in the water after a long break. It is a brilliant time to set that goal, and here at our Reading academy we love January for exactly that reason. But if you are already a diver, or about to become one, we would like to suggest a second resolution to go alongside it, one that costs nothing and takes almost no extra time: pay attention to microplastics, and do something small about them every time you dive.

What Microplastics Actually Are

Microplastics are fragments of plastic smaller than five millimetres, roughly the size of a grain of rice or smaller. Some are made deliberately small, like the microbeads once common in exfoliating face washes and toothpaste, most of which are now banned in the UK. Far more start life as something bigger, a carrier bag, a fishing net, a drinks bottle, a synthetic fleece jacket, and break down over years of sunlight, wave action and abrasion into smaller and smaller pieces that never fully disappear.

What makes microplastics different from the more visible plastic pollution you might picture, the bottles and bags washed up on a beach, is that they are essentially invisible once they enter the water column. They drift with currents, get eaten by plankton and filter feeders, and work their way steadily up the food chain. Divers rarely see microplastics directly on a dive, which is part of why the problem is so easy to underestimate.

Why Divers Are in a Unique Position to Notice

Most people experience the ocean from a beach, a boat deck or a photograph. Divers are one of the few groups who spend real time actually inside marine habitats, at eye level with the reef, the kelp bed or the wreck. That gives us a genuinely useful vantage point. Over a season of diving the same UK sites, whether that is a quarry, a local reef or a favourite wreck, you start to notice patterns: more fishing line tangled around a wreck superstructure than last year, a build-up of fragmented plastic sheeting caught in a gully, or a change in the amount of visible debris after a storm.

This is exactly the kind of observation that citizen science projects rely on. Organisations that track marine litter and microplastic concentration need regular, repeated dives at known sites far more than they need one-off dramatic finds. As a diver based in Reading with regular access to inland sites and reasonably quick trips to the south coast, you are better placed than most people to contribute that kind of long-term data, even informally.

The Scale of the Problem

Current estimates suggest that somewhere between eight and twelve million tonnes of plastic enter the ocean every year, and a significant proportion of that eventually fragments into microplastic. It has now been found in sea ice at the poles, in the deepest part of the Mariana Trench, and in the tissue of fish sold for human consumption. It is not an exotic, far-away problem confined to specific hotspots, it is genuinely everywhere, including in the water you will be diving in this year.

What You Can Actually Do as a Diver

None of this means diving should feel like a guilt trip, and it should not stop you enjoying the sport you love. The point of a resolution is that it is a small, repeatable action, not a single dramatic gesture. A few practical habits genuinely help:

Bring a mesh bag on every dive and use it to collect any obvious plastic debris you come across, without disturbing marine life or digging through silt to find it. Choose a synthetic-fibre wash bag for washing fleece-lined wetsuits and undersuits at home, since these garments are one of the biggest sources of microfibre shedding into wastewater. Support reef-safe sun cream over products containing oxybenzone and octinoxate, which are increasingly linked to coral stress. And where you can, favour dive operators and shops that actively reduce single-use plastic in their own operations, from refill water stations to packaging.

If you want to go further, our Conservation Academy runs courses built specifically around this kind of hands-on marine stewardship, including surveying techniques that feed real data into wider research projects. It is a genuinely practical way to turn a vague good intention into a skill you actually use.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need advanced training to help with conservation diving?

No. Most beginner-friendly conservation activities, including basic litter collection and simple survey techniques, are suitable for newly qualified Open Water divers. More technical survey work, such as species identification transects, benefits from extra training but is not a prerequisite for getting involved.

Does microplastic pollution actually affect UK dive sites?

Yes. Studies of UK coastal and estuarine sediment have consistently found microplastic concentrations comparable to more heavily publicised locations abroad. Freshwater sites, including some inland quarries and lakes used for training, are not immune either, since microplastics travel through rivers and rainfall run-off as well as ocean currents.

What is the single most effective change I can make?

Reducing what you buy and wash matters more than what you clean up on any individual dive. Washing synthetic fabrics less often, using a microfibre-catching wash bag, and simply buying fewer disposable plastic items will do more over a year than any single beach or seabed clean-up, though both matter.

Making It Part of Your Diving Habit

The best resolutions are the ones that stop feeling like a resolution and just become part of how you do things. Pack the mesh bag alongside your mask and fins as standard kit. Mention what you find, or do not find, in your logbook alongside the usual depth, time and visibility. Ask your instructor or dive buddy what they have noticed changing at your regular sites over the years. None of this requires you to become a full-time campaigner, it just means diving with slightly more attention than before, which most divers find makes the sport more rewarding rather than less.

Whether 2021 is the year you start diving for the first time or the year you go a little deeper into what the sport can mean, paying attention to the health of the water itself is one of the most rewarding directions to take it.

How This Fits Into a Wider UK Effort

UK divers are not working on this alone. A growing network of regional groups, harbour authorities and universities now runs regular shoreline and seabed monitoring along the south coast and around inland training sites, much of it powered by volunteer divers logging exactly the kind of observations described above. Reading is not a coastal town, but plenty of our members travel to the south coast at weekends specifically to combine training dives with these monitoring efforts, treating conservation work as a normal part of a dive weekend rather than a separate trip.

There is also a growing understanding that microplastic pollution is closely tied to how we manage everyday waste inland, long before it ever reaches a river or the sea. Reading sits within the Thames catchment, and litter or synthetic fibres entering local waterways here can realistically end up in the same coastal environments many of our members dive in on holiday or during trips with the academy. That connection between an inland city and the health of the coast is exactly why the small, repeatable habits described in this article matter, wherever in the country you happen to be based.

Talking to Newer Divers About It

If you are a more experienced diver bringing a newly certified friend or family member into the sport this year, conversations about microplastics and marine litter are a genuinely good way to build good habits early, before less careful patterns set in. Rather than presenting it as a lecture, most instructors find it works best woven naturally into a dive briefing, a quick mention of what to expect to see at a site, what is normal, and what to flag if it looks different. New divers tend to pick up these habits quickly when they see experienced buddies quietly doing the same thing without making a big deal of it.

Ready to get more involved? Explore our Conservation Academy courses or get in touch to talk it through, we're at Bellman Court, Great Knollys Street, Reading, or call +44 (0) 118 9761 729.