Dispatches from Afognak Island
This a guest blog post by Dr. Switgard Duesterloh.
Just a quick update: I am still sore in every joint and muscle of my body from a 10-day marine debris clean-up venture to Afognak Island, Kodiak Archipel, Alaska. Kodiak non-profit Island Trails Network (ITN) has a history of doing marine debris cleanup work on the remote beaches of the Gulf of Alaska. This September, through a grant funded by the National Fish and Wildlife Service, the charter vessel Island C under captain and Kodiak long-time marine debris authority Andy Schroeder and his great boat crew took a group of volunteers and crew leaders on two 5-day segments to pick up marine debris washed up on the beaches of Izhut Bay.
Marine debris definition: Any man-made or processed material intentionally or accidentally discarded into the marine environment. In Alaska, that includes a lot of line, buoys, and fishing nets, as well as anything that is used on a boat from toothbrushes to food wrappers, fish boxes and buckets. In addition, there is an astounding amount of shampoo and drink bottles, some that arrived in coastal eddies from nearby Kodiak town and some that have traveled the ocean currents for many months or years and hail from as far away as China and Japan. Occasionally, there is a toy truck or bathtub toy; we even found a Sarah Palin for senate election lawn sign.
Why do we pick it up (if you really need to ask)? 1. It is an unsightly mess and should not be in the wilderness! 2. There are chemical spills and leaching of chemicals from the plastics involved, which introduce substances into the wilderness and wildlife, that are not healthy (i.e. pthalates); sometimes we find hazardous materials like batteries and worse. You would be amazed at how many shampoo bottles, buoys and old motor oil bottles we find with bear teeth marks! 3. Entangling debris poses an immediate threat to wildlife, especially marine mammals and birds! The plastic strands wrap around their necks or extremities and cause the animals to die a terrible death by strangling, drowning, or infection from the wounds caused by the line biting into their flesh.
Kodiak is the second largest Island in the US by size, but it has more coastline and beaches than any other US Island. In addition, it is located smack in the path of the Alaska Coastal current, the northern arm of the North Pacific current, which comes from Asia across the North Pacific and splits on the Oregon shore into the Alaska and the California currents. Thus, there is a constant stream of plastic carried on the currents. Some beaches are more susceptible to light plastics that are often carried over the beach brim into the forest behind or get buried and stuck in the jam of driftwood logs. On other beaches it is mostly line and netting that floats lower in the water and is deposited during high energy storms along with the driftwood, in which it gets snagged and tangled. Winter storms work the beaches over and move rocks and sand. Sometimes rock slides come off the cliffs surrounding the beaches or trees crash down from the cliffs as natural erosion takes its course. As a result, all the net and line debris is seriously entangled and partially buried and it takes very dedicated efforts to retrieve. Have you ever lifted a pelagic trawl net? Let’s just say: they are huge.
On the first segment, the group of 10 enthusiastic volunteers included 3 students of chemical engineering from Oregon, who work on projects to develop recycling methods for marine debris. They came with “professor plastic” Scott Farling, co-founder of the Ocean Plastic Recovery Project, which works on ways to give marine debris another life. In these 5 days, we spent 3.5 days on the beaches and 1.5 days traveling and offloading, and we collected 8,777 lbs. On the second 5-day segment with some fresh volunteer muscle power we collected another 5.992 lbs for a total of 14,769 lbs, – more than 7 tons! But marine debris is not like the material you bring to the recycling center. It is a sandy, dirty mess, often mixed with moss, beach grass and pieces of seaweed or filled with dirty water residue and mud, sometimes slugs or beach hoppers that expired inside a bottle. There is also the pop corn: nurdles of styrofoam that seem to be taking over the world-they are found under every bush and on every beach and are impossible to clean up completely, though we do our best to get the bigger pieces. For now, all the debris is stored in the ITN yard. At this time, there is no market for it, nowhere to go. Other clean up efforts bring the materials into the landfills, but how is that an end solution?
Plastic is a resource, and we really need to start treating it like that! Think of all the energy that went into that dish washing liquid bottle from Japan over its life span. How much energy did it cost to make it? How much to fill it, how much to transport it to the store, where someone bought it, used it for a few weeks, then discarded it into the trash. Perhaps it was trucked to a landfill, but before it was securely buried a windstorm picked it up and blew it into the ocean, or the 2011 Tsunami happened and washed it away, or it was a seagull, that took a liking to the flowery smell and dragged it off. Once in the ocean it floated for a long long time, until it made its way to the beach in Izhut Bay, was picked up by a relentless volunteer and stuck into an Alpar bag to be skiffed to the Island C, offloaded onto the deck, transported to Kodiak, offloaded onto the city dock and trucked to the ITN yard, where it was offloaded and stored. From there it will be stuck into a container and sent to Oregon State University, where it will be sorted and cleaned and becomes part of research efforts to figure the best and affordable methods to deal with our global trash problem.
All this manual labor may seem like an extremely inefficient way to deal with a problem of this magnitude. However, there is another side to the beach cleanups, that can be seen as an incredible opportunity. Here is a global issue that has been created during my lifetime, in the post world war II economy. I have seen it get worse, and now I am part of fighting it. All the time while we were putting our backs into moving logs and rocks to extract the entangled nets and lines and bend over hundreds of times to pick up yet another piece of plastic out of the wilderness, the lure of the wild was all around us: the waves washing on the beach, the bird calls, the stunning scenery. Sometimes, after hours of toiling, the skiff would take us for a brief ride to see the whales in the Bay: I have seen the huge fin whales before, but never from a skiff! There was a group of nine of these fantastic big beauties in the Bay and traveling with them were two humpbacks as well. We saw bears, seals, sea lions and sea otters and many different birds and all of them reminded us why we were there. To enjoy the wildness of this amazing place we share with these creatures and to do our part in preserving their habitat and home.
*Note: Parts of this text will be published in the Kodiak Daily Mirror as an amazing nature column soon.