Searching For Solutions To Ocean Pollution With Slater And Kennedy

Wrapping things up in this third installment of our interview with Kelly Slater and Robert Kennedy, if you’ve chewed through the first two chapters, the finish line is in sight. Looking forward, and looking for inspiration, we delve into solutions and the next generation before signing off. – Jake Howard

Kelly Slater: It would be an interesting thing if each city had some true recycling plant like. I’m here in Hawaii people have just gone, “You know what? We’re not gonna try to recycle anymore because we hear they don’t do it. I think it’s like a single digit percentage of stuff that you put in recycling here gets recycled. So, if there was some sort of infrastructure to help the average person deal with their plastics, I think that we would all get onboard pretty easily. If you walk down the beach after a big storm, basically anywhere in the world. you’re going to see all the plastic on the beach.

Robert Kennedy Jr.: The most important thing, we must get the young people motivated, and we have to give them hope. I started by walking up creeks and finding polluters. I sat on lawn chairs next to pipes when I heard there was going to be a discharge at night. I sat on there all night long waiting for the pipes to dump. I’d put diapers in the pipes with rocks on them to weight them down so I could reach in the next day and see if they’d dumped something at night.

Slater: That reminds me, I helped write a book with these kids from a second-grade class in Ocean City, Maryland. My mom is from Bethesda, a place called Germantown, in Maryland. Her high school boyfriend actually owned a surf shop in Ocean City called the Sunshine House. I used to go up there a little bit when I was a kid. Long story short, I got a message on Instagram from a teacher who ask if I would talk to her class. I said yeah and we started Zooming. We were going to do like 20 minutes and two hours later we were still talking. We talked about cleaning up beaches, and kind of what Bobby was just mentioning, where you walk up a riverbed, or you walk along the beaches, and you start to collect all the garbage. And I was telling these kids how Kalani, my girlfriend, and I had walked along the beach in Cocoa Beach. We walked along the high-tide line, and on a beach that looked totally clean, we found more trash than we could carry in garbage. That was in about two city blocks.