When scuba enthusiasts Seif Al Madanat and Beisan AlSharif returned to diving in Aqaba, Jordan, after the Covid-19 lockdown, they could not believe how much litter had amassed on the sea floor.

“We were mindblown by the amount of waste that accumulated because no divers had been collecting it during lockdown” explains Al Madanat, a pharmacist based in the Jordanian capital of Amman. “And when we started looking into it, we read that without intervention, by 2050, the volume of plastic waste in the oceans could exceed that of fish,” he says.

After meeting each other on a post-pandemic dive, Al Madanat, 37, and AlSharif, 34, bonded over a shared instinct to collect bags of sunken plastic. But the more rubbish they collected on their dives, the more they seemed to find.

Moved by the scale of the challenge, the pair launched ProjectSea, which in addition to cleaning and conserving the 28 dive sites dotted along Jordan’s 20 km of Red Sea coastline, is also recycling the recovered plastic into bags and other craft items - creating income for refugees.

To raise the money for the dives – which can be expensive – Al Madanat and AlSharif partnered with a local Jordanian brand, Herb + Design, to sell organic soy wax candles. After the product sold out of its first three batches, they were able to fund four group excursions.

AlSharif, who runs her family's logistics business from Amman, jokes that in the early days of ProjectSea, her friends and relatives would continually receive candles for gifts. "This is how we lit the path of ProjectSea,” she says. “It started as a very small idea, but we wanted to create a movement of sustainability alongside a movement of conscious consumerism.”

ProjectSea struck a chord with local divers straight away and soon also caught the imagination of scuba tourists from around the world. Three years on, the pair have completed more than three dozen clean-up dives and removed some 130,000 pieces of rubbish from the ocean bed.

A 2022 report by UNEP, the UN Environment Programme, estimated that as much as 11 million metric tonnes of plastic ends up in our oceans each year. The increased reliance on single-use plastic items during Covid-19 only added to the problem, with some 129 billion face masks and 65 billion gloves believed to have been in use across the globe every month at the height of the pandemic.

The impact plastic pollution has on marine life is stark. A report in 2015 found that 90 percent of seabirds had plastic in their stomachs, while another study from 2014 estimated that half of marine turtles had eaten plastic, often mistaking it for jellyfish or algae.

“We have almost 500 species of fish and corals, which are colourful, healthy, and thriving,” explains Al Madanat. But while Aqaba’s corals have so far appeared to be resilient to climate change-induced bleaching seen in so many other parts of the world, the reef has been less lucky when it comes to plastic pollution, he says.

“It's not just a problem that Jordan faces. It's a global problem,” he tells Philanthropy Age. “Unfortunately, there are certain species of fish and marine animals that we just don’t see as frequently as we used to, such as stingrays and frogfish. There was a dolphin we called Hope, but we’ve not seen her for over a year, and we are sure it’s because of all the waste items in the water.”

In a bid to both reduce and reuse plastic items, ProjectSea has now started creating reusable tote bags and beach pouches from some of plastic items they recover on their dives. Designed in the blue hues of the ProjectSea brand, these are created by Palestinian refugees from the Orphan Child Welfare Association, a community centre run by AlSharif and founded by her father.

Located in the Jabal el-Hussein refugee camp in Amman, the centre organises weekly activities and vocational programmes for Palestinian refugees and AlSharif had the idea to get them to create tote bags from recovered plastic that can be sold to raise funds.

"We have an embroidery centre within the community centre, with all the mothers working on the tote bags,” she explains. “I wanted to create a product that will help us sustain ProjectSea, and at the same time have the ladies at the centre involved too, so we give them part of the sales and pay them for their time for doing this.”

Community is central to the ethos of ProjectSea. “We have very clear values,” says Al Madanat. “These are: education and raising awareness; women empowerment; and supporting local communities. Creating a community of like-minded people, conscious consumers, is very important to ProjectSea.”

Breaking gender barriers is also a goal, says AlSharif, who recalls that when she started diving, she was often the only female onboard. “When Seif and I started ProjectSea, I wanted to make sure we broke that barrier and so I started really focusing on having more women involved because I always felt like their participation in diving was very humble.”

The efforts have paid off and women now make up at least half of ProjectSea’s clean-up dive teams. “I was surprised that there were so many females who were certified divers but felt like they did not have a community to bring them together,” notes AlSharif. “There's something so special about bringing female energy to something that's very male dominant.”

In addition to the clean-up dives and recycled bags, ProjectSea is now also running workshops in local schools and is soon to publish an illustrated book about their story, with the intention of sparking greater awareness among the next generation of Jordanians.

“We can’t just do clean-up dives, this is not sustainable,” says AlSharif. “We really need to work on education and awareness and embedding it into our culture… We're very hopeful, this generation has so much to give. I feel like we're just paving the road for them. And then it's their job to take over.”