KETCHIKAN-- Kathy Peavey of Craig has long enjoyed beachcombing, especially for the beautiful Japanese glass floats that show up on Alaska shores via ocean currents, winds and waves.

Unfortunately, she sees a lot of other, less pleasant things washed up on the beach. Garbage, mostly. Plastic bottles, nets and buoys. Shoes and line.

"Every time we would all come in from beachcombing, we would always bring bags of trash, or a skiff full," she said.

And when she heard that federal grant funding was available for a beach cleanup effort, Peavey -- aided by several good friends -- submitted a proposal earlier this year.

It was accepted.

Since starting work on July 21, Peavey and others have gathered more than 5,150 pounds of marine debris from the shoreline of Baker Island's Port San Antonio and several other beaches near Craig.

"It's really rewarding and satisfying to be cleaning up these beaches," Peavey said.

Marine debris is becoming a high-profile issue in Alaska and beyond.

Recent media stories, for instance, have raised awareness of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a growing blob of flotsam about 1,000 miles off the California coast.

A lot of stuff finds its way to Alaska's immense shoreline, pushed along by a major ocean current that flows east from Asia before branching up along Southeast Alaska and into the Gulf of Alaska.

Motivated by the amount of marine debris piling up on the Pribilof Islands beaches of St. Paul and St. George in the Bering Sea, some cleanup efforts got under way years ago.

"There's a lot of fishing gear on the beach -- predominantly trawl gear -- and they were trying to clean it up," said Tom Gemmell, deputy director of the Marine Conservation Alliance Foundation. "We got involved in 2003 ... helping fund some of that."

Based in Juneau, the MCA Foundation is the nonprofit arm of the Marine Conservation Alliance industry association of fishermen, boat owners, processors and communities that participate in the crab and groundfish fisheries in the Gulf of Alaska and Bering Sea, according to the foundation.

After its initial involvement in 2003, the MCA Foundation began getting federal grants for cleaning up marine debris in Alaska, said Gemmell.

It's having an effect. According to the Cordova Times, the MCA Foundation removed about 150 metric tons of marine debris from Alaska beaches last year.

The foundation also is actively involved in mapping the locations of significant concentrations of marine debris.

"Given the prevailing currents, you can see along the way where there's some natural catchment areas, and that Port San Antonio is one of them," Gemmel said.

Dave Gaudet, the MCA Foundation's marine debris coordinator, contacted City of Craig Mayor Dennis Watson about the possibility of a local person applying for a grant to fund a cleanup effort in that area, according to Peavey.

She said she put her proposal together with the help of several friends.

"This is not something I could have done by myself," Peavey said. "I have a lot of support from some pretty smart ladies."

Peavey's project was one of several funded by the MCA Foundation through a $1 million federal stimulus grant via the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Peavey, who also has done volunteer beach cleanup work on the Midway Atoll with her son, credited her earlier efforts in helping to secure the grant.

"Kathy was doing some beach cleanup before she heard about our program, so it was kind of a natural fit," Gemmel said. "One thing that's very, very helpful here is that she's got so much local knowledge ... she knows what beaches need work done on them. That goes a long ways. You can focus your efforts and not waste your time searching for stuff."

Beginning July 21, Peavey has focused on Port San Antonio as weather has allowed, with forays to beaches in places such as San Fernando Island nearer Craig when weather hasn't been quite as good.

"The grant allows for 960 hours of collection," she wrote in an e-mail to the Ketchikan Daily News. "I am able to employ up to three people other than myself, and have in the budget room for hiring larger boats to help with the collection of the piles of netting that we have stashed."

"There's stuff everywhere," Peavey said. "These are high-seas trawl nets. High-seas drift nets. Seine nets. Asian trawl nets from all over the place. Cargo netting."

Peavey documents the types of debris, amount and location, using a GPS-enabled camera to gauge precise sites.

She also sends samples of the nets to the MCA Foundation, which has assembled a collection of several hundred net samples.

Gemmell said he's sure that some of the netting that Peavey has found dates back two decades or more.

Peavey and her crew have also turned up hockey gloves, Nike shoes, sandals and other things that fell from container ships years ago.

"We're definitely finding a lot of plastic water bottles and juice bottles," she said. "For the most part it's multicultural; we've found Japanese, Russian, Czechoslovakian writing.

"We've gotten crab pot buoys from Washington, crab pot buoys from Canada," she continued. "These are (buoy) tags that we find that have numbers and names on them. It's definitely not just Alaska trash."

Peavey uses her 22-foot Hewescraft during the cleanup efforts. In some places, kayaker Kelly Tidwell has helped tow a small skiff piled high with debris out from the shoreline to reach Peavey's boat.

The debris is taken to the local landfill.

"We're recycling as much as we can," Peavey said. "They send all the plastics and everything south to get sorted."

Not all the netting goes to the landfill, though. Some people have asked for netting to use as decoration for homes, dorm rooms and businesses.

The work of tidying up beaches hasn't proven easy, Peavey said. It can take hours to unearth nets and line tangled in drift logs, and more time to chase down plastic trash blown into the woods.

Peavey has applied for another grant to continue the work next year.

Gemmell said the MCA Foundation has three federal grants at present.

"If nothing else happens, we have probably funding for two more years," he said, stressing that the funding is for cleanup efforts statewide.

At the end of the 2009 season, the foundation will assess what was accomplished and which projects are providing the most "bang for our buck, so to speak," he said.

"We'll go through a process over the winter here, and we'll pick out projects for the 2010 season," Gemmel said.

Peavey, who schedules the work with an eye toward the weather, said she has until October to complete the current project.

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