Northwestern students tackle plastic pollution on Alaska’s remote beaches. By Tristan Bove
It’s easy to leave the world behind in Alaska. The bellowing gush of a spouting humpback whale or the rustle of reeds as a sea otter pokes its head from the water are some of the few sounds that can break the silence.
But step onto any beach in southeastern Alaska, and that serenity is shattered. Layers of trash, ropes and nets interlace through boulders and fallen tree trunks. Countless fragments of tiny, coin-sized debris intermix with the pebbles on the beach. Much of that debris is plastic.
The problem of plastic pollution extends far beyond this coastline — it is a global crisis. But in this corner of the world, Northwestern undergraduate and graduate students joined a research project to help find local solutions to a global crisis.
In May, Northwestern sent six student representatives to join the Ocean Plastics Recovery Project OPR aboard the R/V Steadfast, a 108-foot research vessel. Northwestern students were supported by the Paula M. Trienens Institute for Sustainability and Energy. Dayne Swearer, assistant professor of chemistry, recommended the excursion for Northwestern students. Swearer, a faculty affiliate of the Trienens Institute, connected the students with OPR leaders.
Alongside a student cohort from the University of Massachusetts Lowell, Northwestern students spent a week under the Alaskan early summer sun, exploring the remote islets surrounding the large but sparsely populated Prince of Wales Island.
Together they cleared beaches of 15,000 pounds of marine debris — solid, human-made material that ended up in the ocean. Every year, tens of millions of metric tons of plastic are improperly disposed of and leak into the environment, including into rivers and streams that eventually dump trash into the ocean.
Most recycling research focuses on how to keep products in a closed loop to create what is known as a circular economy, but it can be easy to forget just how much plastic is still slipping through our fingers.
“My work has been on preventing plastic leakage in the first place,” says Ava Dahnke ’24, who studied chemical engineering at Northwestern. “But [in Alaska I saw] the other side [of the problem]: How are we going to remove plastic that’s already in the environment?”
The project, spearheaded by plastics recycling expert Scott Farling and former Coast Guardsman Andy Schroeder, has been removing marine debris from Alaska’s coastline since 2018.
“In this field, you don’t really get to do much fieldwork,” says Logan Fenimore, a fifth-year doctoral candidate in chemical and biological engineering at Northwestern who joined the expedition. His research focuses on upcycling — turning end-of-life plastics into a class of materials called covalent adaptable networks (CANs), which are physically stronger than plastics but can still be recycled.
“Out here, I can see this is an urgent problem — and it’s really easy not to feel that when you live in a city like Chicago,” Fenimore says. “This trip has reminded me why I got into this field in the first place.”
In 2019, 6.1 million metric tons of plastics ended up in oceans, rivers and lakes, according to Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development data. If waste management systems don’t improve and consumption patterns keep growing, nearly 500 million metric tons of plastic will have accumulated in the world’s water bodies by 2060, more than the weight of the entire human population alive today.
Most of the waste on Alaska’s shores — including shoes, bags and bottles of all kinds — is from the United States’ West Coast, but ocean currents in the northern Pacific Ocean also bring debris from East Asia to Alaska’s shoreline. Such plastic pollution is a dire problem. Microplastics find their way into the diets of fish, birds and bears, eventually entering human food chains. Fishing nets and rope, both mostly made from nylon plastic, can ensnare sea lions, whales and otters, sometimes with deadly results.
An obvious part of the solution to plastic pollution is to retrieve the debris. But, as trip participants can attest, it’s harder than it sounds. You might spot a rope coiled around piles of driftwood on the shore. If it refuses to budge, it might be entwined with a gnarled fishing net. That net might be submerged under heavy wooden slabs, further entrapped by tree branches looping through its honeycomb holes.
Plastic bags and containers can be easier to retrieve but harder to spot. A potato chip bag could be hidden under a few handfuls of soil. A splintered bucket could go unnoticed under a bed of moss.
But the camouflage crown might have to go to foamy packaging material such as Styrofoam blocks and food containers. The small and nimble roots of fast-growing cottonwood trees can easily break through the brittle, pellet-like structure of such products, anchoring large blocks of it to the earth. Throw in some plant cover, and that Styrofoam might as well be a rock when observed from afar.
Ultimately, retrieving more of the debris is going to take hard work. But curbing the use of plastic packaging materials can help prevent the problem from getting worse, says trip participant Meg Ryan, a part-time MBA student at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management and director of environmental sustainability at Ciena, a global telecommunications hardware and software provider.
“We [live in] a world where everything is wrapped in cardboard or plastic and shipped,” Ryan says. At Kellogg she is learning how to develop sound business models for sustainability initiatives. By the end of next year, Ciena aims to have 70% or more of its packaging weight be from recycled content.
Reducing the consumption of plastic products and recovering existing debris from the ecosystem are critical to addressing plastic pollution. But there’s one more wrinkle to consider: what to do with all that recovered plastic.
On Alaska’s Kodiak Island, an empty milk jug sits in the OPR’s sorting facility. The jug has been on a long journey through tides and storms, but that voyage is about to end. The finish line might be a laboratory at the Technological Institute on Northwestern’s Evanston campus.
Once OPR finishes sorting the collected marine debris by plastic type, likely toward the end of summer, samples of the salvaged plastic will be shipped to Fenimore, the doctoral student who is researching upcycling.
The most durable plastics are often inefficiently recycled. Fenimore focuses on turning such plastics into materials known as covalent adaptable networks (CANs), which are physically stronger than plastics but can still be recycled later on. Using chemical additives, he creates this class of materials in a lab by heating and molding a feedstock, usually polyethylene — the most common type of plastic, present in milk containers, detergent bottles and shopping bags.
So far, Fenimore has experimented mostly with previously unused plastic materials. He plans to test this approach against recovered polyethylene plastics from Alaska to determine if the same processes used to create new CANs “could also be used for samples that have sat on beaches for forever,” he says.
Chemical recycling, where high temperatures are used to break plastics down into their molecular building blocks, is promising. These constituent parts can then be reassembled, maintaining the qualities of the original material in new products. But it has a downside too. Some chemical processes can be costly and require large amounts of electricity, which can increase greenhouse gas emissions. Others can generate toxic waste from chemical additives.
For the past two years, Dahnke has been working with the Systems Analysis Research Group at McCormick to quantify these tradeoffs. The lab, led by chemical and biological engineering professor Jennifer Dunn, analyzes the environmental impact of products and processes throughout their entire life cycle to optimize the benefit of emerging technologies.
State-of-the-art analytical tools might also offer workarounds to chemical recycling’s disadvantages. Shivani Kozarekar, a third-year doctoral candidate in chemical and biological engineering and fellow trip participant, focuses on developing machine learning models that can help decide if a potential new plastic is easy to recycle.
Taking solutions from the research stage to the field can and should take time. And in a field like plastics and recycling there can sometimes be a strange disconnect between the urgency of the problem and the day-to-day realities of lab work. An expedition to Alaska, clearing plastic debris from places demanding to be pristine, helped to bridge that divide.
“In the end, we hope that all these things we do on the lab bench as scientists can be applied,” Fenimore says. “This week was a big reminder of our situation [and will help] propel me through the late stages of my PhD. and onward.”
Tristan Bove ’24 MS is a freelance journalist with experience covering climate science, innovation and economics. He visited Alaska for the first time on the OPR expedition.
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Reader Responses
I'm a retired bio teacher, so A+ for this article! Upcycling and recycling and biodegradable packaging are vital to solving this plasti-trash monster! You have inspired me to try, in my suburban home, to avoid or eliminate tossing plastic in the trash and purchase items in paper or no wrappers.
Keep up the good work! No more plastic bags in New York grocery stores. Who would ever have believed that could happen?
—Janet Byler '71, '72 MA/MS, Huntington, N.Y., via Northwestern Magazine
This was a great piece — well written and did a great job bringing in the different angles of the issue in a way that was understandable. Thank you for covering this topic in such an informative way.
—Julie Cahillane '18 MS, Chicago, via Northwestern Magazine
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