Who We Are: Andy Schroeder
Capt. Andy Schroeder is a husband, father, boat captain and co-founder of the Ocean Plastics Recovery Project, and has dedicated his career to restoring pristine habitat to Alaska’s coastline and raising awareness about the sources, impacts, and scale of the ocean plastics problem.
Originally from the Little Miami watershed of Ohio, Andy Schroeder earned a Bachelor of Science from the U.S. Coast Guard Academy (’00) and served two tours in the Coast Guard before founding the non-profit Island Trails Network (ITN) in 2006. Around that same time, he discovered one of the original “Floatees” bathtub toys that captured his imagination and gave rise to ITN’s marine debris removal program, a program which remains strong today.
Starting with small grants and gradually scaling up projects through the years, Schroeder used ITN’s local following and the allure of Alaska to attract national attention to the impact of marine debris on his home islands. Taking care to keep the road system beaches clean, he also took aim at the largest catchment areas, including distant Tugidak and Sitkinak islands in the southwest, Shuyak Island in the northeast and Halibut Bay deep in the Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge.
In 2011 the adventure of starting a family, a stint as a research captain, and the devastation of a distant tsunami all pushed Schroeder toward a deeper commitment to the oceans. For starters, he married his longtime sweetheart Betsy Lund, followed by the birth of their son on Kodiak island. Second, he got a call from the research vessel Island C looking for a relief skipper for an oceanography job. A professional mariner by training but now a full-time executive director, he had maintained his captain’s license but had been off the water for years. A chance return to his roots as a mariner reawakened that part of him and introduced a powerful tool for coastal cleanup. He became Island C’s captain and bought an ownership stake two years later.
The tragedy of the Tohoku Tsunami in Japan erased more than 19,000 lives in the year that Andy and Betsy added one. The aftermath of that natural disaster brought different and more marine debris than had he had seen previously. Although Schroeder points out that the actual increase in volume was modest; plastics posed an existential threat to the oceans both before and long after the tsunami had passed. The real sea change triggered by the tsunami was a $6 million gift from Japan to the U.S. which would temporarily scale up clean-up efforts in Alaska, and show what just one boat with a determined crew could accomplish.
The tsunami relief funds become available in 2013, the year Andy and Betsy welcomed a daughter. By that time Island C had developed a reputation as a scientific research platform, but between research gigs Schroeder filled every bed on his boat with workers and every cubic foot in his hold with ocean plastics. Fueled by the tsunami relief funds, his teams claimed victory over marine debris on 75 contiguous miles of coastline on Afognak and Shuyak islands. Venturing further from home, he took Island C across the Gulf of Alaska for a three-season effort on Kayak Island, an uninhabited rock battered by wind and waves and an epicenter of marine debris that was, in his words “a hundred miles from nowhere.” Helicopters would eventually be hired to insert crews onto wave-battered shores, and to sling bags of debris out of them. Schroeder describes his first day on Kayak Island as a catharsis—realization that the scale of the problem was greater than even he had thought, that fate had brought him out here with this team, these tools, these skills, and that they had a job to do with no end in sight. The project would eventually end, with more than 150 tons of marine debris removed from a 12-mile section of beach by 2016.
In the years since the tsunami, funding for cleanup reverted to its traditional sources—government grants and private philanthropy—in Schroeder’s opinion not enough to make a global impact. Also during this period, China enacted sweeping legislation to stop importing recyclable waste. With scrap prices falling and recyclers shuttering their doors he found himself stockpiling mountains of marine debris without knowing what fate would eventually befall it and resolved to find an end-of-life solution for ocean plastics. Elsewhere, with energy markets looking toward renewables, Big Oil stepped up to meet the demand for plastics with a flood of cheap virgin pellets—and marine debris kept washing up.
In 2018 Schroeder was introduced by a mutual friend (and whale biologist) Bree Witteveen to Scott Farling, a chemical engineer and subject matter expert on the recycling of complex waste streams. Together, they would create the Ocean Plastics Recovery Project with a mission to remove ocean plastics from the natural environment, to identify and develop reuse, recycling, and recovery alternatives for ocean plastics and to share those discoveries with the global community. Importantly, OPR wants businesses and consumers to take part in a movement toward circularity in plastics, and aims to bring in private investment to do so. OPR’s work has opened Schroeder’s eyes to the global nature of marine debris, and to what Alaska’s story can teach the world.
In 2019 he became an owner of the research vessel Steadfast, a 108-foot former Bering Sea crabber equipped with accommodations for larger crews, a helicopter flight deck, and capacity for onboard shredding and grinding of marine debris. On their maiden voyage from Seattle to Kodiak, Schroeder and his then 7-year-old son witnessed together the same marine debris issues in the Pacific Northwest and Canada as they’d seen in Alaska. For now, and for a long time to come, the work would continue. Though the vessel has yet to be assigned its first marine debris expedition, the addition of the Steadfast to the fleet of Kodiak-based research vessels allows Schroeder to do his part to help science advance the knowledge and understanding of the Alaska’s coastal and marine ecosystems.
After a hiatus in 2020, this year OPR embarked on its first major clean-up effort, a quest to use the Island C to remove 25 tons of marine debris from the remote Katmai coast of Alaska. The effort has already attracted media attention, and brought new potential collaborators to the table.
Today OPR’s research efforts are rapidly gaining momentum while Island C’s marine debris removal efforts rack up more tons with each expedition. As more people take notice, including his increasingly inquisitive kids, Schroeder says the mission takes on deeper meaning with each passing year.