The forested coastlines of Afognak Island, part of the Kodiak Archipelago in Alaska, seem at first glance to be pristine and unspoiled. The miles of deserted beaches being left mostly in the care of the island’s brown bears and Roosevelt elk. Unfortunately, that perception is far from accurate, due to the island’s location along the North Pacific Gyre – an enormous ocean current swirling counterclockwise across the Pacific Ocean north of the Equator which deposits hundreds of thousands of kilos of the world’s ocean plastics on its beaches each year.
According to the First Global Integrated Marine Assessment issued under the auspices of the United Nations General Assembly, “although the type of litter found in the world's oceans is highly diverse, plastics are by far the most abundant material (…) Plastics are estimated to represent between 60 per cent and 80 per cent of the total marine debris”. The report alerts that “almost all aspects of daily life involve plastics, and consequently the production of plastics has increased substantially.” Marine debris, clarifies the study, “is present in all marine habitats, from densely populated regions to remote points far from human activities, from beaches and shallow waters to the deep-ocean trenches.”
In light of this, a team of undergraduate students from , a UNAI member institution in the United States, led by Associate Professor of Engineering and Design John Misasi, is working to understand how the world could best use these discarded plastics in the hope that proving their commercial viability could create a robust market for them that, at least as of now, does not exist. “Most ocean plastics that wash up on the shores have, in some way, degraded from their original chemical composition,” said Misasi. “But that does not mean they do not have value as recyclables,” he added.
The expert explained that what they 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, spent five days at Afognak 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 and Wildlife Foundation. “You have to go up over the lip of the high-tide line and into the woods to find all the plastics that have not just washed back out to sea,” he mentioned.
Misasi and his team, are focusing their efforts on building new compounds made from plastics washed up on beaches. According to Molly House, who like Owen is a Plastics and Composites Engineering major at this university, the ocean plastics that wash up on the beaches have all been altered by their exposure to ultraviolet light and saltwater. “What we have been doing is taking these plastics, cleaning them, grinding them up and then putting them into our extruder and then building new compounds from them to see how or if these new compounds made from ocean plastics can be incorporated back into new products,” she said.
So far, House said the results 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. “Now we need to focus on making the process more scalable so that it can be used by bigger operations more efficiently,” she said. Misasi said the work his students were doing could be the first step in a rethinking of how countries are dealing with their ocean plastics. “Showing the worth of ocean plastics as a reusable item and then creating a robust industry niche for that plastic would be so important,” he said.
The students who are part of this initiative agree that if new ways are found to reduce and repurpose existing plastics instead of making new ones, that would be hugely beneficial and a big leap forward. The only thing missing to achieve that, is the right way to do so, in a manner in which the industry realizes how ocean plastics can actually be reused if handled and compounded appropriately. “Ocean plastics have been viewed as a less valuable source of raw materials because they are seen as being too degraded, and what we want to show is that there is a huge potential in using these recyclables to create new products,” outlined Misasi.
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