Help Us Create a Worldwide Network of Little Beach Museums
Do you have collections from your shoreline you’d like to share with a greater audience?
Create your own museum and let us know where it is. We will assign you your own unique charter number and help spread the word about your collection.
Maybe your museum is a shelf in your driveway, a portable trailer attached to your bike, a room in your attic or a shed in your yard. Maybe your museum collection only contains plastic sandals or a multitude of buoys. We can’t determine how you display your collection, how big or small it is, or what found items it should house.
The only rules are:
All items in the collection must be recovered from the shoreline in your community
Every item in the museum must fall under the definition of “garbage” (as in it is not the property of another person)
Our First Charter!
Tumbled By The Sea, LLC
Tumbled By The Sea, LLC is a mobile beachcombing museum located on Long Island, NY. A retired transit bus was transformed into a traveling exhibit filled with a curated collection of sea glass, pottery, artifacts, marine debris, and more!
Tumbled By The Sea offers a variety of educational programming in addition to self-guided museum tours.
Charter 2
The Treasure Plastic Garbage Museum
Located in Rockland, MA, at the Sandpaper Factory. Paul Cheevers’ tiny museum is always growing.
Visit it on BlueSky to learn more: @treasureplasticgm.bsky.social
“I have been amazed, saddened but ultimately excited over many years of walking the beautiful beaches of the South Shore of Massachusetts and Cape Cod finding precious treasures and peculiar human made stuff.
So much stuff. A lot of it, and well… the sea has no use for it so it sort of throws it up on our beaches! So up it washes, at my feet betwixt the seaweed and Irish Moss it’s a Barbie! It’s a Bratz, it’s straws — it’s fishing lines and mangled steel lobster traps! So many plastics!
Often, I pick it up, especially the plastic, and use it for story creation or art making. The garbage of the sea is growing and if we don’t treasure what is already there how are we going to live with ourselves?”
-Paul Cheevers, Founder
Charter 3
The One Beach Plastic Museum
Located in Forest Knolls, CA, Richard Lang and Judith Selby Lang's One Beach Plastic Museum is devoted to changing the conversation about art and about plastic.
Learn more about the Museum and the Lang’s work on their website: https://www.beachplastic.com/
“Since 1999, as a collaborative team, we have been visiting 1000 yards of Kehoe Beach in the Point Reyes National Seashore in Northern California.
We have rambled this one remote beach hundreds of times to gather plastic debris that washes out of the Pacific Ocean. By carefully collecting and "curating" the bits of plastic, we fashion it into works of art— art that matter-of-factly shows, with minimal artifice, the material as it is. The viewer is often surprised that this colorful stuff is the thermoplastic junk of our throwaway culture.
As we have deepened our practice we've found, like archeologists, that each piece of plastic offers a holographic pinpoint look at the whole of consumer culture. Each bit was once used, discarded, washed out to sea then picked up on the beach.
When presenting our artwork, we are often asked if we have done something to the color. Never!!! From the brilliant yellow of a toothbrush handle to the cobalt blue of single-use water bottle lid - the unlimited hues make for a exciting palette of plastic. We are always amazed at the vibrancy of what catches the eye and how the color and texture of plastic stands out from the sand.”
- Richard Lang, Judith Selby Lang, 2025