Companion to On the Beach 1, a volume on the lampshades the designer Jurgen Lehl made from rubbish collected on the beach, as his last project. Where the first volume shows the lamps, in On the Beach 2 abandoned, decayed flip-flops found on the shore are photographed and shown like a specimen book.

Lehl, who had lived in Japan for more than forty years, remembered a beautiful Japan and wanted people to know how dirty it had become; he tried to make something he found beautiful from the waste, and to turn it into something useful. All things should be made to return to the earth after their life, he said: the book asks what we can learn from these words.