Gabrielle Kleber
Student
Senior, chemical engineering and materials science and environmental studies
Clarkston, Michigan

I was given a grant by the Circumnavigators Club, which is an organization—an international organization—that is devoted to global unity. The members pick one or a handful of university students each year to go around the world and study some sort of global topic with a goal to promote global unity. And so my proposal was to study marine debris and get a global view on ocean pollution and its impacts and where it is in the world and how the governments and other organizations are handling it.

So what I did is I independently planned and executed a three-month around-the-world trip, where I visited seven different countries. I was in Hawaii, Australia, the Maldives, South Africa, England, Wales, and Iceland. At each of these locations, I was cleaning beaches but also speaking to locals—local experts, local residents—about the issue and how it impacted their environment, their socioeconomic impacts.

We’re on Sandy Hook, which is at the northern tip of New Jersey. The bay side of Sandy Hook is the side that all the trash from Manhattan and all of New York City comes to.

Primarily, when I first started, my goal was to get an idea of the volume, composition, source, and impacts of marine debris at each location that I went to. And as I started traveling, it really turned more into a social issue, surprisingly enough. And I was really looking into how the people at each location were affected and the cultures and the economy along with the environment.

I run into things all the time like this in different countries. I would always run into people fishing, doing different activities on the beaches, so this is really common. This is kind of a flashback to my trip.

By the end of the summer, I picked up 72,000 pieces of trash. That sounds like a high number, but it really does not put a dent at all into the world’s ocean pollution problem, and I understand that. And that wasn’t necessarily my goal. I had a few goals in mind. One was to kind of understand where the trash was coming from and just to get kind of a global view because there’d been very few studies globally on marine debris. So I think I was one of the first in that sense. And I think it’s important that we—since all of our oceans are interconnected, it’s really important that we get a global view on it so we can see where these items are coming from and maybe hit it at the source.

And then also, ultimately, my goal was to just raise global awareness, and I really think I successfully did that at each of the locations I went to. I was very active within communities. In various countries I pulled together school groups to help me clean the beach. I joined local community groups that were cleaning the beach. I talked to lots of local residents, so I really just got out there and spread the word on the issue.

People don’t understand what happens when they throw something in the ocean. I spoke with a lot of people in the fishing industry while I was traveling, and they all said the same thing—that they’re just tossing it into an abyss. They don’t realize how connected everything is, that—they say—an item thrown overboard in Japan can make it around the world in six years.

I’ve been a very fortunate person. I’ve had so many opportunities and so many experiences at such a young age that I would love if someone would look at that and want to be that just because I think it’s important that people get out and see the world and do these things and be proactive. So if I can pass that onto someone, that would be wonderful.

Two biggest things is take opportunities as they come and take risks. You got to do both of those things. You can’t just let opportunities go ’cause they’re not going to come back. You got to jump on ’em and take risks. Nothing—nothing, out of the ordinary—is easy, but it’s almost always worth it.