Yakutat, Alaska (CNN) -- Residents of towns in the Alaska Panhandle have begun picking up plastic bottles, chunks of foam insulation and floating buoys from Japan's 2011 tsunami. "This is urethane spray building foam," Chris Pallister, president of the conservation group Gulf of Alaska Keeper, said as he picked through trash on Montague Island, about 200 miles north of Juneau. "We just never got much of that before. But if you walk up and down this beach, you see big chunks." Hi-res photo gallery: Japan tsunami debris reaches Alaska The foam comes from the walls of buildings that were smashed to splinters by the wall of water that slammed into Japan's northeastern coast after the March 2011 earthquake that left nearly 16,000 known dead. The wreckage was swept out to sea when the wave receded and has drifted 4,000 miles across the northern Pacific in the 14 months since then.
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"If you walk up and down this beach, you'll see big chunks," Alaska man says
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NOAA says it doesn't have the budget to clean remote areas
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Tsunami debris could be washing ashore for a year, NOAA says
Volunteers like Pallister have been trekking out to remote areas like @placeholder to help clean up the beaches.