Student Interns Open OPR’s Innovation Center
This summer, OPR hosted its second cohort of interns, this time to open our Innovation Center in Kodiak and begin the process of recycling the piles of marine debris collected at Kayak Island under a grant from the NOAA Marine Debris Program.
Our 2024 cohort included four interns from Oregon State University (Peyton Stringer, Eloise Thoreson, Samuel Vacca, and Jacob Walsh) who have been studying chemical engineering under Dr. Skip Rochefort and two interns from Western Washington University (Megan Gillaspy and Mato Jacoby) who have been studying plastics & composites engineering under Dr. John Misasi.
The team was trained to sort the recovered ocean plastics and other marine debris according to protocols developed by our 2022 interns. This included sorting all plastics by resin type, grade, and level of degradation so that they can be returned to the circular economy at their highest and best use. While sorting through tens of thousands of pounds of debris, the interns learned about the wide range of plastics applications in packaging, aquaculture, fisheries, and other industries. They also gained experience using our TrinamiX handheld near-infrared spectrometers to accurately identify resin types and assure that we are producing high purity recycled products.
From left to right: Mato Jacoby, Megan Gillaspy, Eloise Thoreson, Peyton Stringer, Jacob Walsh, and Samuel Vacca
In addition to the hands-on work at the Center, our students also attended lectures on the fundamentals of plastics and plastics recycling, creating a circular economy for plastics, policy initiatives including extended producer responsibility (EPR), sustainable textile development, mechanical recycling of PET for textile applications, chemical synthesis of biodegradable polyesters with improved mechanical properties, and emerging technologies for chemically and biologically recycling plastics.
During week three of the internship, our team climbed aboard the research vessel Island C to join Island Trails Network (ITN) for a 6-day EPA-funded cleanup at Shuyak Island. We were fortunate to also have Dr. Andrea Westlie, a postdoctoral researcher from Cornell University, and Kyla Sjogren, a material scientist at Columbia Sportswear, join us in the effort and share their knowledge. Together, under the leadership of OPR crew leaders, Kenzie Hahne and Alice Schermer, we removed approximately 12,000 pounds of marine debris from the island with most of our work focused on Wonder Bay and Andreon Bay.
The final week concluded with students demonstrating their work and describing their research to a congressional delegation from Senators Sullivan and Murkowski’s offices.
Special thanks to those who took time out of their schedules to help enrich our internship program: Nina Butler (Stina), Dylan de Thomas (The Recycling Partnership), Dr. Katrina Knauer (BOTTLE Consortium at the National Renewable Energy Lab), Sohan Mangaldas (Unifi), Kyla Sjogren (Columbia Sportswear), and Dr. Andrea Westlie (Cornell).