JUNEAU, Alaska—A massive cleanup effort is getting underway in Alaska, with tons of marine debris—some likely sent to sea by the 2011 tsunami in Japan—set to be airlifted from rocky beaches and taken by barge for recycling and disposal in the Pacific Northwest.
Hundreds of heavy-duty bags of debris, collected in 2013 and 2014 and stockpiled at a storage site in Kodiak, also will be shipped out. The barge is scheduled to arrive in Kodiak by Thursday, July 16, before setting off on a roughly one-month venture.
The scope of the project, a year in the making, is virtually unheard of in Alaska. It was spurred, in part, by the mass of material that’s washed ashore—things like buoys, fishing lines, plastics, and fuel drums—and the high cost of shuttling small boatloads of debris from remote sites to port, said Chris Pallister, president of the cleanup organization Gulf of Alaska Keeper, which is coordinating the effort.
The Anchorage landfill also began requiring that fishing nets and lines—common debris items—be chopped up, a task called impossible by state tsunami marine debris coordinator Janna Stewart.
