Finding a new life for marine plastics

Jutting out into the Gulf of Alaska, Kayak Island collects a lot of seaborne trash. But an organization called the Ocean Plastics Recovery Project (OPR) is working to make the remote island a stopover for marine debris, not its final destination. 

OPR removed 116,330 pounds of debris from Kayak Island in 2024 and an estimated 65,000 pounds in 2025, on top of another 216,000 pounds they had removed around a decade prior. Just as significantly, OPR has been finding a new destination for the trash, operating a Kodiak recycling facility where materials are sorted, processed and prepared for a potential second life. 

“People can do a cleanup and look down a beach and feel a sense of hopelessness, but there’s a path forward,” said OPR co-founder Andy Schroeder. “We go to work with optimism that this could become an industry of its own and that there is value in these materials.”

Prior to co-founding OPR, Schroeder spent years organizing marine debris cleanups through Kodiak’s Island Trails Network. As recycling markets shifted and dried up, he found himself with accumulating piles of plastic with nowhere to go. Then he met Scott Farling, a chemical engineer who saw untapped potential in the waste stream. 

“I was surprised that a lot of the material had good properties, and there was value,” Farling said.

But turning assorted beach trash to treasure is not a simple process. That task is complicated by the diversity of materials that wash ashore–everything from fishing gear and buoys to household products from Asia. Plastic is often degraded by years of exposure to sunlight, saltwater and physical abrasion, and it can also have sand and rocks embedded in it. 

Schroeder and Farling co-founded OPR in 2018 to build a plastic reuse and recovery industry in Alaska, and in 2024 they opened the Innovation Center recycling facility. At the facility, marine debris is sorted by resin type, grade, and degradation level into almost 100 different categories. Some items, like floats and buoys in good condition, are designated for reuse. On the other end, some items in too degraded a condition are earmarked for disposal. But most of the plastics are designated for potential transformation into raw materials. They are washed, shredded, melted, and turned into granules that can eventually be molded into new products.

“We’re collaborating with our university, industry, and national lab partners to experiment with various recycling processes,” Farling said. “Our goal is to develop and implement recycling processes that produce the highest quality materials with the lowest possible environmental impact.”

Meanwhile, OPR is continuing its cleanups at Kayak Island, which Schroeder describes as an indicator of the scale of marine debris in the North Pacific. Just a year after their 2024 cleanup, crews found substantial amounts of debris had accumulated again, to the tune of roughly 4,300 pounds of debris per mile of shoreline. OPR raised private funds to stage another cleanup in 2026, and hopes to continue returning to the same areas of Kayak Island in the future to collect debris and monitor how quickly it returns.

“If all these efforts with prevention, education and corporate sustainability efforts are having an impact, we should see it there,” Schroeder said.

OPR is a founding member of the Alaska Center for Marine Debris (ACMD), a collaborative effort with Alaska Sea Grant dedicated to cleaning up and disposing of the state’s marine trash. One of ACMD’s principal efforts is administering the NOAA-funded Community-Led Marine Debris Removal program, which has supported the Kayak Island cleanups. ACMD also provided the startup funds for the Innovation Center.