Six ambassadors to Croatia dived off the Dalmatian island of Murter on Tuesday to join members of WhiteFlag International to help clean the Adriatic Sea and mark World Environment Day.

WhiteFlag International, in cooperation with the Canadian Embassy and local authorities, launched the Ocean Ambassadors environment protection project on Murter to preserve, protect and systematically clean the Adriatic, which was supported by more than 30 foreign officials and ambassadors in the country.

Along with ambassador Daniel Maksymiuk of Canada, other ambassadors who took part in the dive were Thomas Eberhard Schultze of Germany, Juraj Priputen of Slovakia, Lars Schmidt of Sweden, Stefan Estermann of Switzerland, and Andrew Stuart Dalgleish of the UK.

They dived with professional WhiteFlag International divers to pull out plastic and other non-biodegradable waste accumulated on the Adriatic seabed off the coast of Murter.

“In spite of poor underwater visibility, we managed to pull out 25 bags of garbage. But the priority today was not just to pull out as much garbage as we can, but also to get ambassadors to take part in this, even though they all donned a diving suit for the first time today,” said Kike Curavic, professional diver who led the event.

The 250 kg of waste we pulled out today is no small matter, but much stronger is the message we sent on the importance of sea preservation, said Maksymiuk.

The first such clean-up which involved diplomats accredited to Croatia was organised to raise awareness on one of the biggest problems of today, which is the large amount of plastic material and non-degradable waste which ends up deposited on the seabed or floats in the sea and threatens both marine wildlife and human health.

Almost a third of all plastic packaging we use does not get recycled, meaning it directly polluted the environment. It is estimated that some 13 million tonnes of plastic material ends up in the world’s oceans and seas every year, which poses a direct threat to marine wildlife, killing around 100,000 marine animals per year.

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