A massive cleanup effort is getting underway in Alaska, with tonnes 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, 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.

 

The Anchorage landfill also began requiring that fishing nets and lines — common debris items — to be chopped up.

The cost of the barge project is estimated at up to $1.3 million, with the state contributing $900,000 from its share of the $5 million that Japan provided for parts of the U.S. affected by tsunami debris. Crews in British Columbia will be able to add debris to the barge as it passes through, chipping in if they do. Delays due to weather could drive up costs.

 

The cost to operate the barge is $17,000 a day.

 

Many of the project sites are remote and rugged. Crews working at sites like Kayak and Montague islands in Prince William Sound, for example, get there by boat and sleep onboard. The need to keep moving down the shoreline as cleanup progresses, combined with terrain littered with boulders and logs, makes it tough to set up a camp. There's also the issue of bears.

 

While relatively few people visit these sites, it's important to clean them. Foam disintegrates which can seep into salmon streams or be ingested by birds. There's concern, too, with the impact of broken-down plastic on marine life.

 

What's not picked up can get swept back out.