Le Méridien Al Aqah, one of Clean Up Arabia’s supporting partners for the past 8 years, hosted this year’s 17th CUA event on Saturday 24th November.
2012 wrapped up another successful year on the East Coast dive site clean ups of Dibba and Fujairah and the Al Aqah beach clean up. 340 participants joined forces to battle out the different debris collections. It was a beautiful day with perfect temperatures for the event to take place. Everyone was armed with the driving force of enthusiasm, bags for beach or diving clean ups, gloves and the all important ICC cards to be filled out per group.
Emirates Diving Association (annual organisers since 1995) members, partners, families and friends separated into their groups, the divers went off to their assigned boats for the dive clean ups and the others stayed behind to do the beach clean up. Several hours later, everyone came back in time to enjoy some lunch in the garden of Le Méridien and shared some interesting stories of the strange items found.
Thanks go to everyone who filled out the ICC cards. The information is vital for the International Coastal Clean Up report which is compiled by the Ocean Conservancy.
To end the day’s event, a friendly game of volleyball was played by 4 teams made up by Dubai Duty Free, FSDC (Filipino Scuba Diver Club), EDA Member’s Team and Le Méridien. A big congratulations to DDF for winning first place, followed by Le Méridien in close second and EDA falling into third place. Cups and Medals were presented to the winning categories.
A big thank you to the faithful event sponsors and to the newly joined sponsors for all their support and concerns regarding the environment and backing up Clean Up Arabia and all its volunteers! Platinum Sponsors – Coca Cola and Dubai Duty Free, our Gold Sponsor – Stanford Marine Group and our Silver Sponsor – AkzoNobel.
We look forward to more participants for next year’s Clean up Arabia 2013!
For info: http://www.cleanuptheworld.org
