(water bubbling) - [Narrator] Marine debris is everywhere around us.

It just hasn't always made it to the ocean yet.

The first time I heard about marine debris was through a picture book.

It was a story about a little piece of plastic that took to the seas, far from home.

It wasn't until years later that I learned about the darker side of ocean plastics.

(suspenseful music) But I didn't know what was actually out there, beyond the page, until I got invited on a remote beach cleaning trip in my home state of Alaska.

To be honest, I didn't expect we'd find too much below the waves.

Alaska's a big place with not a lot of people.

And how hard could it be to undo the actions of a few careless individuals?

It's not an oil spill.

So, with a sketchbook and some extra tufts, we headed far away from people, toward Alaska's most remote and beautiful coastline.

(upbeat music) From the boat, I didn't see any ocean plastics.

Only once we stepped foot on the beach, till be actually start to see the marine debris, buried in the tide line from all over the globe.

Even the smallest corner of beach had enough trash to fill a sketchbook.

This didn't feel anything like that story I had heard as a kid.

It is beginning to feel like a very different picture book.

If you give a beach a bottle, it's going to insist that it comes with all of its friends.

This doesn't just include the things that float, but the things that tangle as well, nets and lines can be a pain to remove, but they're nothing compared to the microplastics.

A few years ago, you could have picked these up by hand, but now it's broken into a thousand pieces.

They're now so small they're becoming part of the food web.

It's one thing to remove ocean plastics.

Once they get into animals, it becomes a much more complex problem.

Bio accumulation means that little toxins have a big impact as they work their way up the food chain affecting anything, any one who relies on the ocean.

And that's just the chemical side.

If you go below the surface, you can find a much more entangling situation, but unlike these lines, there's very few closed loops when it comes to recycling ocean plastics.

Subsidies and policies, man it's far easier to make new stuff, than it is to do something with the old.

So, disposable plastics, will keep on ending up on beaches like this, no matter how much we pick up now.

Still cleaning up these beaches is really time sensitive and important, but if you give a beach a bottle, it's probably because it came from a sea of problems.

(upbeat music) This really doesn't paint the happiest picture, but hopefully this is just a piece of a larger story.

If we can do something now, then maybe the next generation, will grow up with a different picture book.

A story about the adventurous people who came together to make sure these little pieces of plastic got back home.

♪ Here it goes ♪ ♪ Here it is ♪ ♪ When it comes down to it ♪ ♪ We all want to live in our homes ♪ ♪ In our beds ♪ ♪ With a love on which we can rest our heads and hearts ♪ ♪ What's in your heart ♪ ♪ What's in your heart ♪ (water splashing)