A World Made of Plastic
By Zoe Wise
Published February 16, 2024
1. Styrofoam. Big, little, droplet-size, moss-covered, strewn on the forest floor, inescapable, pieces of Styrofoam. Some are soaked through with seawater so that they bear the brown-orange tint of the ocean. Next are packing straps, which Switgard, today’s team leader, tells me are the best thing to clean up off beaches because they are the worst for marine animals. The straps are buried deep under rocks and logs. The cleaning of straps takes three hours of digging under the sand, completed by a team of three women and one captain. Even then, in the end, they can’t be 100% removed. There’s a tree with a rope tied around its wide trunk three times for security; it’s been there so long that the tree has grown into and around it. Sap overflows as we wedge our knives between the rope and the trunk. Fields of plastic bottles. Tampon applicators. The takeout container from your lunch. A single boot with baby barnacles growing out the side. A football, deflated, and a note in a bottle from a child in California. These are just a sampling of what we found on the beach during our first trip out. We fill about ten trash bags apiece, put those trash bags into two super-sacks, lug the super-sacks onto a skiff, and then transport the trash to the main boat.
At night I dream about the Steller’s Sea Cow. This usually happens when I’m on a boat, rocked to sleep by the breath of the ocean. There’s so little we know about the cows, so I mostly dream in question marks. We know their diet of kelp helped promote a positive balance between kelp and algae on the seafloor. In my dream, I taste the salt and sweetness of pickled kelp, a local favorite. We know they were around thirty feet long, roughly the length of three kayaks. I imagine the rough patina of a hide as I reach into salt water to run my hands across the smooth corpse of a cow. We know they were tasty – tasty enough that they became extinct only thirty years after colonial discovery. Even in my dreams, it seems, I’m haunted by destruction.
2. Yesterday I boarded the Island C in Kodiak, Alaska. She’s usually deployed for photography cruises to Katmai National Park, but this week she’s a trash boat. We’ve headed out into the Kodiak archipelago to pick up marine debris that has washed ashore. There are ten women on this trip, made up of six volunteers (including myself) and four female crew members. Then there’s Tom, the boat engineer, and Andy, the ex-Coast Guard, non-profit running, soft-spoken captain leading the charge. The Ocean Plastics Recovery Project is Andy’s brainchild, and it is the reason we’re out here. Maybe he’s inspired by creatures like the Sea Cow, or maybe after the 2011 tsunami in Japan that sent five million tons of debris into the sea and headed straight for Alaska’s coastline, he felt like he didn’t have a choice.[1] Either way, debris in the ocean is a problem.
It's only been a day and a half, but so far we’ve collected debris from Korea, Sri Lanka, Japan, Vietnam, the United States, the Philippines, and various countries in Europe. Here in the Kodiak archipelago, we’re in a unique position to collect debris from around the world. With more coastline than any other island, the archipelago is located in the path of the Alaska Coastal Current and the northern arm of the North Pacific Current, which means there is a constant stream of debris, mainly plastic, deposited onto the shores. After the plastics are deposited over the summer, winter storms move rocks and sand around on beaches, burying the debris and making it difficult to remove.
Technically, marine debris is any man-made material discarded into the marine environment. But in reality, most of it is plastic. We find a fly swatter, two refrigerators, two separate insoles from two separate shoes, a flip flop, pounds and pounds of plastic rope, about twenty different five-gallon water jugs, plastic buckets, a fishing pole, more Styrofoam, more plastic bottles, milk cartons, Folgers coffee containers, liquid detergent bottles, a barrel full of oil that ends up leaking all over the skiff, old nets, buoys, a crab pot that might be able to be repurposed, and a giant plastic tube wrapped into a tree. It doesn’t take long to learn that the worst debris is the fishing materials—the plastic nets and ropes everywhere. Nets sunken under sand take hours to dig out. At one point, I put on waders and walk across a tiny lagoon to hook and pull a tangle of nets down to the beach. There isn’t a beach we go to without signs of commercial fishing. When I ask my sister, a crew member and veteran of these excursions, what I should write about, her first response is how the fishing industry destroys the ocean in more ways than overfishing. If we stopped fishing for one day we could save so much plastic in the ocean, she tells me. In a way, farmed fish might be better for the ocean than wild.
3. Again I dream of Sea Cows. If Sea Cows were still around today—even though they would be technically protected under the Marine Mammal Protection Act—they would still be at risk. Fishing nets lost at sea wander the ocean like listless brides, wrapping themselves on reefs, shipwrecks, or outcroppings of rocks. They trap marine animals in their arms—limiting their mobility, strangling, and suffocating them, or keeping these elegant creatures from moving fast enough to get food or avoid predators. Baby animals with waste stuck around their bodies grow into deformities, their organs shaped around the contours of these nets. All this pain and suffering, plus they’re a pain for us to clean up. The nets tangle, catch roots and branches, and seemingly sink into the sand wherever they land.
At lunch, Andy pulls up the radar and shows us where we are going next. We’re headed for a cove inside Island Bay, on the south side of Afognak.He points to some promising coastline where debris is likely to have washed up. It's wet and conditions aren’t right for travel, so he uses the opportunity to step away from the wheelhouse to teach us about the work we’re doing. Plastic, he explains, is light, strong, and degrade-resistant. Too degrade-resistant, it would seem, as many plastics that enter the ocean remain in the marine environment indefinitely, in some form or another.[2] Ultimately, the rate the plastic breaks down depends on the physical, chemical, and biological conditions, but even on the sea’s surface, the rate is characterized as “very slow.”[3] Plastic pools up in garbage patches on and beneath the ocean’s surface, resembling a watery soup of nets and bottle caps—catching fish, seabirds, and other creatures. It might seem weird that nets are made out of plastic, but plastic is easy to shape and manipulate, and in the end, much more useful than the hemp rope traditionally used. I can’t think of a single fisherman who would need their nets for that long, and I want to imagine fishing nets passed down like family heirlooms, but something tells me that doesn’t happen.
Start noticing it, and soon enough it will feel like you live in a world made of plastic. Plastic starts innocently enough—a bag here and there when you forget your reusable, or a brand-new toothbrush once a month—but it accumulates quickly. This is a problem because not all plastic is recyclable, and even if it is, due to thousands of variations of plastics requiring sorting and individual melting, the reality is that only about 5% of it ends up being recycled.[4] If you were to put every piece of plastic you touch into that blue bin on your curb, chances are, it would end up in a landfill anyway. Most plastic does. As for the rest? Well, it’s why we’re out here. Whether it falls off a boat, is directly thrown off a dock, or is carried by a cunning bird from a landfill, plastic accumulates. Approximately 14 million tons of plastic waste end up in the ocean each year.[5]
With all of this running around in my mind, we get ready for our afternoon trip to the beach. There’s no such thing as too wet to pick up marine debris, so even though it’s raining hard outside, inside we’re getting ready to head to shore. There’s a pile of about nine pairs of XtraTuffs—the unofficial shoe of Alaska—by the door to the salon, and I feel a pang of guilt remembering the solo boot we cleaned up off the beach that morning. We’re armed with trash bags, knives, gloves, bear spray, knit caps, lip balm, sunglasses, and water bottles—all the essentials for an afternoon on the beach. It’s hard work picking up trash; even the volunteer who is a professional bodybuilder admits she’s exhausted at the end of the day. It is the best sort of crossfit, and it’s wonderful. You have to lift logs, pull nets from sand, and roll tires along the beach. At night we destroy a meal of pistachio-crusted halibut, asparagus, and quinoa, followed by a cheesecake and a couple of bottles of wine. We’ve earned it. The volunteers and crew have an all-girl dance party while the men retreat to their rooms.
4. A gas can, a buoy, then a croc. A tire and another buoy. Countless water bottles, Styrofoam, an aerosol can, a bucket, and an ice cube tray. Rope, then a soccer ball. A hook in a shampoo container. A hard hat. A plastic spoon. I want to be looking at something else. At one point I find a tuft of bear fur hanging off some beach wood and tuck it into my pocket, thinking I can turn it into earrings. Over a break from the rain, I rub my fingers across the ribs of a seashell, then push it aside to collect a bottle cap broken in half, hidden under a rock.
Most of the items we find are broken in some way; it’s rare to find a piece of marine debris that is as good as new. On some beaches, tiny bits of plastic are scattered about, indistinguishable from their original form, and so small you could sift them through your fingers like sand. That’s because plastic doesn’t ever truly break down, rather, it breaks up.[6] Indeed, most commonly used plastics never go away. Think about what that means for your plastic consumption—every plastic item you’ve ever used is still around today, and will be for as long as the earth exists. It might start as a take-out container, but it’ll end up as tiny fragments of chemical compounds, filling up a landfill or floating around in the ocean. Microplastics swimming around in the water have become so prevalent they’ve become a part of the food web. Birds, fish, and other marine creatures are routinely found dead with plastic bloating their bellies. Even the smallest ocean residents are at risk; microplastics under the ocean’s surface block sunlight from reaching plankton, which renders them unable to produce nutrients. Facing a beach full of plastic shards, we fall onto our hands and knees, doing our best to remove every millimeter-seized fragment we can find.
At lunch, it’s Switgard’s turn to teach, and we learn what will be the fate of the debris we’ve collected. By the time we get to it, much of the debris is sandy, dirty, and covered with moss and algae. Options for disposal could include recycling, thermal depolymerization, incineration, or sending it to a landfill, but as of right now, once it’s collected, it has nowhere to go. Unlike non-ocean-affected plastic, there’s little market for marine debris collected from the ocean. What of the debris collected from this trip, the many trips before it, and the many trips after it? It sits in a storage facility, awaiting a purpose. Some of it is shipped off to universities, where researchers try to find methods to deal with this problem. But most of it just waits. Plastic is in no hurry—it can wait forever.
5. The simple beauty of the Kodiak strikes you even when littered with debris, though the beaches are the best when clean. There’s the brown-green of bull kelp that litters the shoreline, lying atop a bed of fist-sized rocks, weathered logs, and the occasional shell. Just past this point the grasses begin—tall, bright green, thick, ribbed, and usually moist with drops of the last rainfall. There’s the white spruce, taller and heartier than you’d find in the interior, and the occasional chocolate lily or highbush blueberry plant. Sometimes you’ll find an animal carcass, and in the right spot, you might find a wild mushroom. Now, I look out at the calm ocean before me. The sun is hanging low behind a painting of clouds while the skiff approaches the shore. I am sad to leave.
Back on the boat, the deck is littered with white super-sacks, both taller and wider than me, filled with five days’ worth of our beachcombing efforts. It’s a little under 5 tons, which feels like nothing compared to the approximately 17.5 million tons of marine debris that gets added to the ocean every year.[7] Another boat is on the way to collect the debris, take it back to Kodiak for storage, and clear room on the deck for the next weeks’ worth of collection. The next crew is coming in by floatplane, as we hitch a ride out. The group knows it’s my first time on a floatplane, so they let me sit up front with the pilot and the best view. It’s wet and a little bit frightening in the tiny plane. I see water pools off the front windows as we make our way through clouds, above the ocean and islands I’ll never know the name of. We ride low, sometimes directly next to mountains and it feels so close that I could reach out and touch them.
By the last day of the trip, I stopped keeping track of the items we collected; there’s too much of the same thing and too much of everything. I just tried to get as much of it as I could. I wanted to leave the beach spotless; I want someone else to be able to enjoy it. Yes, these places are remote, but these beaches are people’s homes—they’ve been used by the Alutiiq/Sugpiaq since time immemorial, and more recently non-indigenous settlers in the last couple of centuries. Kodiak is a vibrant community of recreational pilots, boaters, surfers, artists, and subsistence hunters, fishers, and gatherers—and that’s just the humans. The island is also home to the Kodiak Bear, a terrifying and majestic creature that stays up all year feasting on the island’s abundant supply of marine creatures. I don’t want the bear to end up like the Sea Cow. The least we can do is leave the place better than we found it.
If you’re reading this, chances are that you already know that responsible trash practices are best for the Earth. We’re told throughout our childhood the value of reduce, reuse, and recycle, but because this message flies in the face of consumerism, oftentimes the focus ends up being on recycling rather than reduction. Saying you’re going to recycle something makes it easy to justify the use of plastic here and there. Even if you don’t want the plastic, if you’re someone who buys their food at a grocery store, it can be hard to avoid. I don’t come to you with any answers. But the next time you’re faced with the choice of using plastic or not, take a moment to ponder how long the plastic you choose will be on this earth. It will still be here when humans, like the Sea Cow, have become extinct. By the end of the week, one thing was clear: I don’t want to contribute to the problem anymore.
[1] National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration, Japan Tsunami Marine Debris, (last visited: Feb. 13, 2024), https://marinedebris.noaa.gov/disaster-debris/japan-tsunami-marine-debris; see also Andy Schroeder, Who We Are: Andy Schroeder (Jun. 30, 2021), https://oceanplasticsrecovery.com/opr-blog/7dzplzshcm1ehnflnps7ham920geos.
[2] United Nations Environmental Programme, Marine Plastics Debris and Microplastics: Global lessons and research to inspire policy change, 22 (Mar. 14, 2017), https://wedocs.unep.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.11822/17561/Marine%20Plastic%20Debris%20and%20Microplastic%20Technical%20Report%20Advance%20Copy.pdf?sequence=1&%3BisAllowed=.
[3] Id. at 30-1.
[4] Laura Sullivan, Recycling plastic is practically impossible – and the problem is getting worse, NPR (Oct. 24, 2022), https://www.npr.org/2022/10/24/1131131088/recycling-plastic-is-practically-impossible-and-the-problem-is-getting-worse.
[5] International Union for Conservation of Nature, Issues Brief: Marine Plastic Pollution (Nov. 2021), https://www.iucn.org/sites/default/files/2023-11/marine-plastic-pollution-issues-brief_nov21-nov-2023-correction.pdf.
[6] National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration, Plastic, (last visited: Feb. 13, 2024), https://marinedebris.noaa.gov/what-marine-debris/plastic.
[7] International Union for Conservation of Nature, supra note 5.