Ralph Groenheijde
The idea came from his two-year-old son, who preferred to collect bottle corks instead of exotic shells in the white sand beaches of Costa Rica.
Now, Ralph Groenheijde creates art from trash on the beaches of Holland.
This hyperactive Dutch ended up turning the idea into a project: transforming waste into a crazy artwork. Groenheijde grouped waste in its “TrashUre Museum”: Trash Treasure.
Ralph exhibits, for example, an elegant decorated hat, a series of flip flops rainbow and a mannequin wearing a dress sewn from blue fishing nets.
The first ‘trash treasure hunt’, organized in the Netherlands three years ago via social networks, allowed Ralph to build a pirate ship, to the great joy of children playing on the beach.
Then I started to call the garbage bins ‘treasure chests’, and now we are treasure hunters,”
says with a smile this 44-year-old therapist.
The centerpiece of the “TrashUre Museum” is a ‘world map’ in which the lands are made with 30,000 cigarette butts, and surrounded by a sea of bottle corks and plastic waste that was floating in the oceans.