On February 7th, I joined an underwater and shoreline clean-up with the Emirates Diving Association at D-Marin Marsa Al Arab. I went into it thinking I had a pretty good idea of what to expect.

But seeing it collected in one place was something completely different.

When you first look at the beaches on Palm Jumeirah, they seem clean. There’s no obvious trash piles, nothing dramatic, nothing that makes you stop and think something is wrong. It’s the kind of place where everything looks taken care of.

And for a while, that’s what I thought too.

But then I started paying closer attention.

When people think about plastic pollution, they usually picture the obvious: bottles in the ocean, trash on beaches, bags floating aimlessly everywhere. But the bigger problem isn’t what we can see… it’s what we can’t.

When people think about motorsport, they usually think about speed. What you don’t see as much is everything happening around the track to make those moments possible.