'Frozen Ground' the Sequel: Aftermath

Having spent the better part of August 2010 sailing around in the North Pacific Ocean with a group of people trying to get a handle on the amount and possible cleanup of all the plastic trapped in a gyre out there, I've become a lot more sensitive to the amount of plastic I and everyone else use and thought a bit about the supply chain. Where does all that plastic come from and how does it get into the ocean? Granted most of what we saw could have come off boats, but it originated on land one way or another.
How some of it gets there became crystal clear during the drive to work yesterday. At the Kink River I glanced over and noticed the movie people were gone and wrote about that, but another thing I saw was a big wad of Visqueen blown into a tangle of brush on the beach. (For non Alaskans, Visqueen is plastic sheeting and we use the term genericly) The plastic in the brush bothered me on the drive and I convinced myself to go over there and clean up what I could. It also led to thoughts about its location. That Visqueen was about a hundred yards or less from the Knik River. At this point it's probably less than two miles to Knik Arm, Knik Arm empties into Cook Inlet which in turn connects to the Gulf of Alaska and the North Pacific Ocean. It doesn't take too much imagination to figure out that this Visqueen which incidentally is in a high wind area could easily end up in the river and the ocean. All so people could watch a movie about an Alaska serial killer and because a few people with the crew couldn't take the time to clean up after themselves. To be fair it's possible some of this trash was left by others before the movie people arrived, but I am sure the Visqueen wasn't there and (ugh) I opened one bag and the garbage smelled fairly fresh. I suppose I could have poked around and looked for discarded paperwork to confirm it, but then, you only get so much from volunteers.

There's a bit of an added problem boat people will appreciate, at least any of us who have tangled Visqueen in a propeller. Awful stuff and if the shaft or outdrive overheats, that crap melts to the metal and is almost possible to remove. It could get worse than that if it gets sucked into a cutlass bearing.

The trash is in a good place now and just to balance the bad with the good, when I told the nice woman at the landfill where it all came from she only charged me two dollars instead of the usual six.

THE PHOTOS: The one with the black bags is the total pile collected. The one with the smaller Visqueen is to show the proximity to the Knik River and the large piece is self explanatory.

For images from the North Pacific trip click on the Sailing with Chip gallery in the right-hand column. There are photos of some of the trash we collected out there.