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Meet the Ecopreneur:
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The nonprofit organization has collected half a million pounds of plastic-waste while innovating how the world tackles the issue of marine debris.
70%
of all shallow-water reefs
in u.s. are located in Papahānaumokuākea
Eco•pre•neur: an environmentally minded entrepreneur who leads and drives climate action worldwide
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Listen to Kevin O’Brien on rescuing marine life from dangerous ghost nets.
Listen to James Morioka on how PMDP is like the local trash truck.
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A RESCUE AT SEA: How cleaning up Hawaii’s most sacred region is saving our oceans.
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Kevin O’Brien of Papahānaumokuākea
Marine Debris Project
Kevin O’Brien has spent decades traversing the waters of the Pacific. At first, he sailed the ocean at the helm of his own refurbished sailboat, and then after graduating from the University of Hawaii, he traveled as part of the team at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), conducting and coordinating ship-based marine research missions. Eventually, his work brought him to the shores of the remote Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument.
This string of uninhabited islands and atolls stretches for about 1,200 miles to the northwest of the main Hawaiian islands. It’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site that’s home to thousands of different animals, numerous endangered species, 70% of the U.S.’s shallow-water coral reefs, and—because of circulating ocean currents—just under 1 million pounds of plastic waste.
Marine debris is one of the top threats to the habitats and wildlife of Papahānaumokuākea, with an estimated 57-plus tons of debris entering the monument’s waters every year. O’Brien knew more needed to be done to protect this beautiful—and sacred—place. So, in 2019, he founded the Papahānaumokuākea Marine Debris Project (PMDP), a nonprofit that leads large-scale marine debris removal missions to collect derelict fishing nets and plastics from the reefs and shorelines of Papahānaumokuākea and spreads awareness about the issue of marine debris. By the end of 2022, O’Brien and his team had removed more than half a million pounds from Papahānaumokuākea—and they are only continuing to innovate more ways to make an impact.
To learn more about O’Brien’s journey as an ecopreneur, we sat down with him in Honolulu Harbor in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Q: Why are you personally motivated to fight climate change?
A: Going to Papahānaumokuākea and witnessing the issue with all this debris for the first time was definitely the light bulb moment for me. I had worked for about 12 years for NOAA, and I learned many things throughout the course of my tenure there—mostly how to conduct complicated remote field operations using boats and ships. But the NOAA cleanups weren’t happening as frequently as needed to keep up with the annual accumulation.
Papahānaumokuākea is an incredible gem, but no one lives there to clean it up. I knew this project was incredibly important, so I jumped ship from my secure job with the federal agency and decided to start a nonprofit to continue this project.
Q: What is the impact of plastic on
the ocean?
A: There are a lot of hidden impacts. This material is so pervasive in our oceans that plastic becomes more plentiful than the food that marine life eats, and so they often mistake it for their food source. There’s a lot of seabird mortality that happens as a result of being fed plastics. There’s also damage to coral reefs. “Ghost nets” (derelict fishing nets) are made of plastic rope and line. They wash in, snag on the coral reefs, and break or smother them. No one sees that impact. But where we work, we see it daily, hourly, and we see how much damage it’s doing.
Q: Why is the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument important to Hawaii?
A: Papahānaumokuākea is almost 583,000 square miles, which is enormous. It’s bigger than all the national parks in the U.S. combined, and it holds 70% of all the shallow-water coral reefs in the U.S., as well as 7,000 species, 23 endangered species, and 14 million seabirds.
The islands in Papahānaumokuākea have the highest density of ancient Hawaiian cultural sites in the entire archipelago. The identity of the place is very much wrapped up in Hawaiian creation narratives. It’s a sacred place that’s home to the world’s most protected wildlife species.
Q: What role do the reefs have in the Hawaiian ecosystem?
A: The reefs are incredibly important to the marine ecosystem. Seventy percent of all the shallow-water reefs in the U.S. are found within Papahānaumokuākea. Because this is a protected area, human activities aren’t really allowed there. These ecosystems bloom, and those healthy ecosystems are generating larger fish populations and healthier reefs. It has a positive impact.
Q: What is PMDP’s mission?
A: When we started PMDP, it was simply to make sure that this cleanup project was able to continue. That remains our goal. But there are opportunities to improve on what we do. We want to go from simply removing marine debris to actually engaging in coral reef restoration and really conducting more outreach and education, letting people know about this incredible ecosystem, this incredible area, and bring these issues to light to the general public.
Q: Why is physically removing debris from the ocean so important?
A: Human intervention can be a really positive management tool. More than 32% of all the endangered Hawaiian monk seals are alive today
because of marine debris disentanglement, cleanups, and other human interventions. This species only has 1,500 individuals left, so every one of those interventions makes a huge impact.
Q: What does a typical day look like for you out on the boats?
A: On a typical day, our team gets up at 5:00 a.m. We prep our boats, have breakfast, prep our gear, and have a safety meeting. Then we launch the boats over the side of the ship and drive them through the reef to the beach or to the reef that we’re going to be cleaning. Our divers jump in the water, we swim, we survey the reef, and we pull out the net. Sometimes, these nets are deep; sometimes, they’re weird shapes that don’t really lend them-selves well to cutting. And they’re always extremely heavy. It could take several hours to cut, process, or lift a
net and finally get it in the boat. And you may have to call over other teams from adjacent areas to help you lift it into the boat. It can take as many as 12 people to get one of these nets up.
Q: How much debris can you collect on a typical day?
A: At the end of every day, when the boats come back to the ship to offload their debris, our measure
of success is if each boat has a pile that’s almost as high as a human. Each boat may have gathered between 2,000 and 3,000 pounds of marine debris. The 2022 single-day high for the PMDP team
(16 divers) was 11,605 pounds of marine debris removed. The 2022 single-day high for a boat team
(4 divers) was 4,745 pounds of marine debris removed.
Q: How does technology make your job easier?
A: Technology plays a huge part in terms of our future plans and what we’re currently developing. For example, we utilize drones to cut down on the time it takes to locate these ghost nets in the water so that we spend less time in the water swimming and trying to find them.
We’re working to develop a machine learning algorithm that will be able to identify what is net and what is reef and then geolocate those nets. We’re working really hard on research and development to actually make that a usable tool. The same goes with the people power required to do the operation. We cut all these nets manually and lift them into the boat manually—and we know there’s major room for improvement in
terms of the tools that we can develop, the techniques that we can fine tune, or the vessels that we can build that might be more suited to the work that we do. So looking ahead, this is where technology will play a huge part of what we can do and how we do it.
Q: What is your biggest achievement so far?
A: Since we started the nonprofit in 2019, we’ve removed more than half a million pounds from Papahānaumokuākea, which I feel like is a pretty significant accomplishment, considering the fact that we started conducting large-scale operations right during the heart of the COVID-19 pandemic. And it made pulling off these large scale, ship-based missions about 150% harder. I’m really proud of our accomplishments.
Q: What drives PMDP’s success?
A: It’s the people. James Morioka and I have worked really hard to try to build a team based not on their resumes or their qualifications on paper, but simply based on team fit. And so we have people coming in with almost no experience sometimes but who have what it takes—the incredible work ethic, the right attitude, the morale boosting qualities that we really need.
Q: Where do you see PMDP in the next five years?
A: In the next five years, our goal is to catch up with the backlog of marine debris that has accumulated over the past 15 years in Papahānaumokuākea.
That means hitting the ground really hard and spending as much time as we can in the monument and in the water cleaning the reefs. We anticipate that we may reach that point in 2027, and once we reach that point, then we might be able to pivot and spend more of our resources on tackling the shoreline accumulation and the stuff that washes up on the beaches versus the reef. So, our catch-up-and-keep-up strategy is going to keep us busy for the next five years.
Q: Why do you need more people to support your mission?
A: The way that people can really help is twofold. One way is making good consumer choices; that will drive which companies stay in business. So, if you’re able to vote with your wallet and spend your money on products and with companies who are not contributing to this problem, then that can help.
Another way to help is donating to our cause. It’s really expensive to operate here, and donations are incredibly helpful.
Q: What makes you feel optimistic about
the future?
A: The amount of support we’ve received
has just been incredible. I really expected it
to be a lot harder to bring people on board with what we’re doing. But at the end of the day, the outpouring of support that we’ve seen has enabled us to scale up our work to the point where, for the first time since I started doing this 15 years ago, I’m able to actually see that dealing with this problem in Papahānaumokuākea is doable. We can catch up with what’s there, and we can keep up with the annual influx. It’s more than half a million square miles of ocean—but it’s possible.
Read More
EXPLAINER: See how PMDP is reducing the effects of marine debris to its
lowest levels.
Removing the world’s plastic waste from an endangered ocean
Read More
BEHIND THE SCENES: Episode 11
of The Ecopreneurs in Hawaii.
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Eco•pre•neur: an environmentally minded entrepreneur who leads and drives climate action worldwide
Back to home
©2023 Fortune Media IP Limited. All Rights Reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy (Your California Privacy Rights) | CCPA Do Not Sell My Information Fortune may receive compensation for some links to products and services on this website. Offers may be subject to change without notice. Quotes delayed at least 15 minutes. Market data provided by Interactive Data. ETF and Mutual Fund data provided by Morningstar, Inc. Dow Jones Terms & Conditions: S&P Index data is the property of Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc. and its licensors. All rights reserved. Terms & Conditions. Powered and implemented by Interactive Data Managed Solutions. | EU Data Subject Requests
[CUSTOM BANNER AD]
Read More
BEHIND THE SCENES: Episode 11 of The Ecopreneurs in Hawaii.
Read More
A RESCUE AT SEA: How cleaning up Hawaii’s most sacred region is saving our oceans.
Explore More
Read More
EXPLAINER: See how PMDP is reducing the effects of marine debris to its lowest levels.
Removing the world’s plastic waste from an endangered ocean