草榴社区

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草榴社区 students, faculty devote chunk of their summer to cleaning up ocean plastics on Alaska's Kayak Island

Three teams spent two weeks apiece off the grid on remote, stormy island

by John Misasi

草榴社区 Associate Professor of Engineering & Design

草榴社区 students prepare a cache of assembled Kayak Island ocean plastics for pickup by the Ocean Plastics Recovery Project last summer. Over the course of the summer, almost 200,000 pounds of ocean plastics - from buoys to flip-flops - were collected.

Western Washington University鈥檚 Polymer Materials Engineering program has been partnering with the since 2019 to collect and recycle ocean plastics from the Alaskan coastline to find reuse pathways and show their value as recycled materials. 

Last June and July, 草榴社区 students, alumni, and faculty went to Kayak Island, Alaska, a remote island approximately 60 miles southeast of Cordova, to help OPR and their team clean-up marine debris. The clean-up was part of a multiyear NOAA grant to study how quickly marine debris accumulates on a known 鈥渃atcher island鈥 and to create recycling pathways for the materials collected.

A lone brown bear comes down a beach on Kayak Island to investigate the new loads of oceans plastics assembled by 草榴社区 students in preparation for them being hauled off the island and recycled.

Three different clean-up teams were on the island for two weeks at a time for a total of six weeks. Current 草榴社区 students Serena Herschleb (Environmental Science), Ian LeCloux (Polymer Materials Engineering) and Mia Knipe (Polymer Materials Engineering), 草榴社区 alumni Danielle Crow (Master鈥檚 in Teaching, 2019), and professors John Misasi and Nicole Hoekstra (Emeritus) all went to Kayak Island to help. The teams spent two weeks on the off-grid island, where all water had to be brought-in by helicopter or filtered, electricity was provided by solar or generator, and pit toilets served as the bathrooms.

Collection of marine debris, which comprised rigid plastics, ropes, nets, foams, glass, and aluminum, occurred by hand on challenging-to-navigate coastal terrain consisting of massive log piles, tidal marshes, boulders, and sand. Due to safety concerns from rockfall, aggressive coastal waters, and the distances being traveled, teams were brought from camp to the clean-up site by helicopter every morning. Teams filled bag after bag of debris, tagged and geolocated each bag, and then moved on to the next section of beach. Teams worked eight-hour days in rain, wind, sun, and bugs for a total of 36 days of collection. 

At the end of collection, bags and odd-shaped debris were grouped into sets of three items or approximately 600 pound loads, which were 鈥渟lung鈥 by the helicopter out to a barge sitting a few miles offshore. In total, the clean-up collected between 160,000-200,000 pounds of marine debris over an eight-mile section of the 20-mile-long island.

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