Beach Recovery began in 2002 with a single idea: rather than hold a line against the sea, build something that persuades the sea to bring the sand back. Nearly everything built along an eroding coast up to that point had been an act of resistance — walls, revetments, armour stone — and nearly all of it had the same long-term result. The structure held, and the beach in front of it disappeared.
The early years went into understanding how land is actually reclaimed from the sea, learning from the handful of people then working on it. The company was incorporated in 2004. What made the work credible was not a theory but a habit: photograph the site before anything is installed, then photograph the same view from the same place, years later, and let the two frames argue with each other. Manistee, Michigan was photographed in 1993 and again in 2000. A refinery shoreline in Saudi Arabia was photographed before installation in 1999 and one year afterwards.
In 2006 the approach reached the Connecticut legislature, where House Bill 5803 was raised and approved on 9 June 2006.
How it began.
How it began.
Then, in 2008, the founder was in a car crash. Field work stopped. The recovery was long, and the pause changed the shape of the organisation rather than ending it: an art gallery opened, and a foundation was established to explain why the shoreline is worth repairing at all. The canvases the nearshore structures carry came out of that period. So did the films.
The years that followed were spent building the public film and art work, on advocacy, and on searching for the right strategic partnership — one that could carry the shoreline work around the world and sustain it there.
In 2025 the engineering and the intellectual property behind the Beach Recovery System were transferred to Basalt International, an independent company that now engineers, manufactures and installs it. Gregory Sarno serves there as President, Shoreline Recovery & Protection Systems. Beach Recovery no longer provides shoreline recovery services.
What stayed with the Foundation is everything the engineering made possible: the art programme, the film work, and an archive of dated photography covering more than two decades of coast. In 2026 the Foundation works in collaboration with Basalt International, supporting an established global list of potential beach recovery projects now under site assessment, permitting and development.