What I Started Noticing on the Beach

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.

Not in a big, intentional way at first… just small things. Looking down while walking instead of straight ahead. Actually noticing what was around me instead of just passing through. And once I saw it, I couldn’t really unsee it.

It’s not big things. It’s the small stuff that’s easy to miss if you’re not looking for it: Bottle caps. Bits of plastic. Pieces of netting. Straws. Tiny fragments of things you can’t even fully identify anymore.

Individually, none of it feels like a big deal. You could walk past it without thinking twice, and most people do, including me for a long time. But the weird part is that it’s always there. Every time I go out, I’ll notice something. Not a lot, but enough that it doesn’t feel random. It starts to feel like a pattern. And I think that’s what stuck with me the most.

It’s not that the beach is dirty, it’s that it’s consistently a little bit dirty in a way that can really become invisible if you’re not paying attention to it, which is kind of worse because when something looks clean overall, you assume the problem is already handled. You don’t feel like there’s anything for you to do.

Then, that led me to start thinking about how many people walk those same beaches every day. Residents, families, people exercising, people just out for a walk. I asked the question: if every person picked up even a couple of pieces, wouldn’t it stop building up the way it currently does?

But then at the same time, I realized something else: even if you wanted to pick something up… there’s not always anywhere to put it. That sounds small, but I think it matters more than it seems because most people aren’t actively choosing to ignore the problem. It’s just that in the moment, it’s slightly inconvenient. You don’t have a bag, there’s no bin nearby, and it becomes easier to keep walking.

I’ve done the same thing, and I think that’s the part that changed how I started thinking about it. At first, I thought the problem was just the trash itself, but now I’m starting to think it’s more about the gap between noticing something and actually doing something about it.

That space in between. Where people care… but in reality nothing really happens.

That’s what made me start asking different questions, not just, “How do you clean this up?”but, “How do you make it easier for people to act in the moment?” Because if the system doesn’t support the behavior, even people who care aren’t going to follow through consistently.

I don’t have a full solution yet, but I think that noticing it was the first step. And once you start seeing it, it’s hard to go back to not thinking about it at all.

This is where a lot of what I’m working on is starting from.

Not from a big idea, but from something small that kept showing up until I couldn’t ignore it anymore.