The forested coastlines of Afognak Island, part of Alaska’s Kodiak Archipelago, seem pristine at first glance , the unspoiled miles of deserted beaches left mostly in the care of the island’s brown bears and Roosevelt elk.
Sadly, that perception is far from accurate. The island’s location at the end of the North Pacific Gyre, an enormous ocean current swirling counterclockwise across the Pacific Ocean north of the equator, deposits hundreds of thousands of pounds plastic from North America and Asia onto Afognak’s beaches each year.
A horrific amount of waste, yes, but also a trove of ocean plastics to be harvested and recycled by Misasi and his students.
“Most ocean plastics that wash up on the shores of places like Kodiak have, in some way, degraded from their original chemical composition,” Misasi says. “But that doesn’t mean they don’t have value as recyclables. What we are trying to do is figure out how these ocean plastics, in their various degrees of degradation, can be broken down, mixed, and recombined into new compounds just as good—or better— than their original form.”
One of Misasi’s students, Christofer Owen of Sammamish, spent five days at Afognak last year as part of a beach cleanup effort funded by a grant through the Ocean Plastics Recovery Project, the Island Trails Network and the National Fish & Wildlife Foundation.
“I was excited to see firsthand the places where the plastics we have been working on actually come from, and the island is just as incredible as I thought it would be,” he says. “The beaches we cleaned up at first glance often looked quite pristine. But you have to go up over the lip of the high-tide line and into the woods to find all the plastics that haven’t just washed back out to sea.”
Fishing gear, nets, buoys, shoes, large and small chunks of Styrofoam—the beaches of Afognak had them all.
“We pulled 5,000 pounds of old nets off of Afognak’s beaches,” he said. “A storage container washed off a ship seven years ago that was full of plastic flyswatters, and some of them are still washing up on Afognak today. These things just don’t go away.”
So far the results of their work to recombine and reuse ocean plastics have been extremely encouraging, and have produced compounds using three major plastic types that were far more elastic and less brittle than compounds made from just one type of recycled plastic—proof that the circular economy is possible using recycled plastics, with, at the moment, limitless resources in ocean plastics alone.
Their work on recombining different types of ocean plastics to produce high quality new plastic ready for re-use will continue, and while a return trip to Afognak was canceled because of the pandemic, the organizations working on the cleanup efforts there are eager to see Western students back on the island when the virus is under control.
In the end, Misasi says that no amount of work on reusing plastics will keep them out of landfills and off beaches without significant shifts in behavior by the two most important parts of any type of economy, circular or otherwise: the manufacturer and the consumer. One way to push forward on the manufacturing side is to put into place new policies that help prevent plastic waste—anything not recycled or reused—from being manufactured before it can even get into a landfill.
“Until we—and I mean the ‘big We,’ as in humanity—are willing to consume less stuff, managing our waste will always be an uphill battle,” he says. “And that starts with education and awareness on all our parts. We need to emphasize the ‘reduce’ part of reduce, reuse, recycle if we want to make a real dent in the plastics problem.”
That’s good advice, graduate.