Alaska tribes, Ocean Conservancy outline scale, cost of marine debris cleanup and ‘‘backhaul’' challenges

Remote Alaska communities and tribal stewards told the Alaska House Resources Committee on May 7 that marine debris — largely fishing gear — is washing onto shorelines at scale, threatening subsistence resources and wildlife and imposing heavy local costs to remove and properly dispose of it.

Dr. Lauren Devine, ecosystem conservation office director for the Aleut Community of Saint Paul Island, told the committee that Alaska’s roughly 44,000 miles of shoreline and many communities reachable only by air or boat make debris removal especially difficult. “We have to compile a local crew… each time that we conduct a cleanup, it’s about 20,000 pounds of debris,” Devine said, and she added that most of that material is fishing-related gear. She described a disentanglement program that responds when seals or other marine mammals arrive on shore entangled in net fragments and rope, and said about 80% of the disentanglements her program logs are caused by net fragments and packing bands.

Ralph Wolf, director of indigenous stewardship for the Central Council of the Tlingit & Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska, described coordinated cleanups in Southeast Alaska that cleared “about 10,000 pounds in 10 days” with roughly 60 participants across multiple communities and paid youth stewardship crews. Wolf told the committee that hazardous materials, remote access, weather, and staging and transportation requirements increase costs and planning time. “A lot of these places where a lot of marine debris ends up is not very easy to get to,” he said, urging state investment in mitigation, producer accountability, and recycling pathways.

Vanessa Taubone, environmental project coordinator for a Bering Strait nonprofit that serves 15 communities, emphasized short summer operating windows and multimodal transport needs—planes, barges, helicopters—and said storm events can push debris inland, complicating cleanup. Michael (Mike) Levine, senior director for Alaska programs at Ocean Conservancy, described the organization’s role in funding, technical support and network-building, and said backhaul — moving collected debris off remote islands and to recycling or disposal facilities — is a central bottleneck. He cited an EPA-funded pilot to move stockpiled debris from communities into Kodiak or the Lower 48 and noted that securing sustained federal or philanthropic funding remains uncertain.

Presenters and questioners described a range of logistical responses already in use: partnership with tribes and local organizations, targeted grants (Ralph Wolf said one cleanup used a $25,000 Ocean Conservancy partnership grant), use of Coast Guard assets for heavy removals, and efforts to find or expand destinations for sorted material (Kodiak, Anchorage, and Seattle were named). The committee heard that data collection is ongoing — Devine cited past cleanup databases showing millions of pounds removed statewide between 2005–2014 — and that harmonizing datasets with NOAA, Sitka Sound Science Center and Alaska Sea Grant is under way to better track sources, types and quantities of debris.

No formal legislative action was taken during the hearing; presenters asked the committee to consider sustained funding, logistics support for backhaul, and policy measures that include producer accountability and recycling pathways. Committee members asked about partnerships with Fish & Game and local municipal waste operations, and several representatives offered to help connect presenters with additional communities and state wildlife staff for data sharing.

The presentations underscore three recurring constraints: the predominance of fishing-related gear among debris found on remote Alaska shorelines, the high per-event labor and transport costs to remove and sort large, tangled materials, and the shortage of local disposal or recycling capacity that forces communities to stockpile material or rely on costly transport to southbound facilities.