Every morning a tractor rolls over Manly’s picture-perfect beaches, scraping away the signs of the day before. But below the water’s pristine surface, where council clean-up teams struggle to scour, a jumble of plastics tell a different tale.
It is a story Richard Nicholls knows well. Over three decades, the 63-year-old “Tricky” Nicholls has led thousands of divers and snorkelers on monthly clean-up dives while tracking trends in Sydney’s marine plastics.
The seabed acts as a public record, full of stories from Sydney’s past. “We’ve found everything from an accordion to a kid’s piano, and last year, to everyone’s shock, we found a lady’s sex toy,” says an incredulous Nicholls.
“We found an inmate’s bag from when they exited the New South Wales correctional centre. Maybe they tossed it over the Manly ferry, saying ‘Yippee, I’m free’.”
While underwater, it’s easy to spot an item at odds with nature’s colour palette: a flash of neon pink tangled in blades of kelp isn’t the scales of a fish – it’s a raspberry vape. But some larger items, such as shopping trolleys, have been swallowed by the sea for so long they are camouflaged by moss and barnacles.
Trends in marine plastics are constantly shifting. “The physical weight of rubbish is usually the same,” says Nicholls, but the diversity of plastics is changing. “We probably found around four or five straws today, whereas we used to find 1,000 to 2,000.”
As some items have disappeared, other culprits – particularly vapes – have rocketed. Dog poo bags are another bugbear. “I don’t know how you can ‘accidentally’ drop them in the ocean,” he says.
Nicholls began scuba diving for ocean litter in the 1990s. One day, while combing Manly’s shark nets and seagrass for seahorses as part of a conservation project with a local aquarium, instead of being mesmerised by sea creatures he found himself distracted by a sheen of inanimate objects.
“We were just completely appalled by the amount of litter there,” he says.
Nicholls learned to dive in 1977 in Britain before trading murky quarries and frigid gravel pits for the tropical waters of Fiji, the Great Barrier Reef and, finally, Sydney. He took over a defunct dive shop in Manly, where it became second nature to pocket plastics while scouting for marine life.
At first this was in net bags, before he ordered custom-made divewear with compartments to store litter.
Attitudes and behaviours towards littering span a wide range, says Nicholls, who retired last July from his role as a dive centre owner and president of the Dive Industry Association of Australia. “More young kids are on board with the environment, but you also still see people leaving their rubbish.”
When I join Nicholls on a Dive Against Debris, a team of 25 divers empty out their arsenal of reclaimed plastics on to the beach. Runners dart past while parents push buggies and cradle coffee cups; some come over, intrigued by a pavilion full of plastics – an autopsy of the issues underwater.
In the late 2000s, Nicholls began lobbying local businesses to abandon single-use plastics by bringing this ocean haul with him. He would knock on doors with evidence of fast food containers, straws, cutlery and incongruous soy sauce fish-shaped packets that had migrated from eateries on the Corso, Manly’s main pedestrian shopping strip, to the seafloor.
“You have to be ‘tricky’ and have a rhinoceroses skin, otherwise you become disillusioned,’” he says. “It’s a very hard business being a lobbyist.
“You need a really major result in your life to make that worthwhile. Otherwise, it would just be heartbreaking.”
His former dive shop, Dive Centre Manly, was one of the first in the world to organise a formal Dive Against Debris, now a worldwide movement with the Professional Association of Diving Instructors. Over 120 countries take part, with citizen scientists divers retrieving plastics and logging data in an international database.
It’s early one summer’s morning when I join Nicholls for a dive, before Manly Cove becomes a kaleidoscope of beach cabanas and towels. Christmas, Easter and Australia Day are pinch points when bins overflow and litter seeps into the sea from the ferry, Nicholls says.
Today is no exception – our team of 25 divers pulls out over 700 items in 45 minutes, weighing 10kg all together.
Although Australia is one of the world’s biggest consumers of single-use plastic per capita, studies also indicate that a large proportion of the country’s marine plastics originate from overseas. Manly Cove, however, is sheltered, so the link to local littering is harder to ignore.
What ends up in this small body of water – and later become microscopic plastic bits – are the scraps of picnics not collected, coffee cups blown from the ferry, or wrappers discarded as people meander along the Corso.
Diving for debris can feel like a game of whack-a-mole; some predict there will be more plastic than fish in the sea by 2050.
It’s a sense of urgency that propels Nicholls to return to his minute patch of the seafloor. “If we can stop plastics going into the ocean and turning into microplastics, then we’re winning,” he says.
Despite its sheltered position, Manly Cove is listed as a microplastics hotspot by the Australian Microplastic assessment project. It’s a race to stop plastics breaking down into even smaller fragments, with research indicating anything under 5mm is a greater risk to human and ecosystem health.
“I’m not desensitised to it, nor do I lose hope. I still believe that at some point there’s going to be an end to it,” says Nicholls. That end will be reached not just by recycling and reducing single-use plastics, he says, but “We also need to be less materialistic as a society.”
Ultimately, Nicholls has faith that tides are changing. “I’ve still got great hope that’s going to happen because we get a lot of young people in our clean-ups. They’re a new generation of torchbearers who are super passionate.”
Despite his retirement, he says he’ll still be returning to Manly Cove for years to come.
“I’ll keep diving to pick up plastic,” he says. “It’s a rubbish job, but someone’s got to do it.”
