It took time and a little luck for the Langs to identify a mundane item they kept finding on the beach: a three-inch-long, half-inch-wide red plastic rectangle.

After they'd found nearly 80 of these rectangles, Richard's daughter, Amelia, remarked: "Duh! Those things are in everyone's lunch box." Turns out they were cheese spreaders from Kraft Handi-Snack products.

"A lot of what we find has been at sea for a long time," Richard says. "The color has faded. It's been buffeted by sand. Rhizomes have attached to it. You can really sense the history of the life of the object. So one of the things we like to do is show a larger collection of one single item."