Art project Dirty Beach is opening a very special supermarket in Brighton this November.

Dirty Beach (Brighton-based artists Lou McCurdy and Hanksy) is calling its supermarket TruCost Super-M-Art.

The stock will consist entirely of discarded plastic items found on UK beaches.

Many local residents have taken part in litter picks on Brighton beach, possibly as part of one of the annual beach cleans by Surfers Against Sewage.

I joined in with Surfers Against Sewage last year and was amazed at the volume of waste washed up or left behind.

However, Dirty Beach’s installation isn’t just a call to clean up the beach.

It’s intended to draw attention to issues of plastic pollution, waste and consumption; all of which is mixed with plenty of humour.

The artists say:

“The TruCost Super-M-Art will explore our relationship with plastic; principally that every plastic item any of us have ever owned still exists in some shape or form.

When we throw things away, where exactly is ‘away’? We all take single-use plastics for granted, and consider them a simple fact of modern life, but are they in a sense the Emperor’s New Clothes? Are we sacrificing our most precious resources at the altar of convenience? For the hundreds of millions that we spend globally on single use plastic packaging, what are the effects on our sea life, our planet’s ecology, and our own food chain? What ultimately is the TRUE COST of our relationship with plastic?”

I’m looking forward to visiting the supermarket as it sounds so intriguing, with some of the items said to be recognisable as tongue-in-cheek parodies of supermarkets’ own brand product lines.

Tru-Cost Super-M-Art will be at the ONCA Gallery from November 16th to December 21st before being re-housed within the Waste House at Brighton University in 2014.

For more see the Dirty Beach Facebook page at http://on.fb.me/1gt36F3 or the Twitter feed at http://bit.ly/17pTvh2.