Steampunk Coffee have been supporting Scottish Coastal Clean Up through our charges on single use cups and so far (as of June 2026) we have donated £1487.48 to SCCU. We are keen to raise awareness of the problem of plastic pollution on our coastlines with our customers and visitors over the busy summer season and as part of this will host an exhibition of artwork made out of collected marine plastic pollution on our terrace throughout the month of August 2026.
Steampunk and SCCU are reaching out to our creative community and so far have had lots of interest from local artists to produce artwork made out of the rubbish recovered on SCCU beach cleans. We believe this will be a great way of engaging with customers and visitors and illustrating the scale of the issue. In order to coordinate all of these different artist’s efforts we are proposing to build a temporary structure on the Steampunk terrace shaped like a wave which will display the collection of artworks. This would be built by a couple of local young woodworkers as a wooden framework over which we would drape some recovered trawler netting. The wave would curl over the entranceway forming a tunnel through which customers would have to walk through to access the cafe. We believe this would be visually impactful and would be great way of raising awareness of the problem as well as giving an impression of the scale of it.
As part of the exhibition we will display photographs of the beach cleaning done by SCCU and descriptions of their work. We will also share a display board giving easy steps that customers could take to reduce their own polluting footprint or support the efforts to clean the plastic from our beaches and oceans.
How you can be involved
Artwork
We would love to display artworks created out of recovered marine plastics by lots of different people on the wave - we were thinking of sticking with a sea theme. These could be real or mythical creatures, plants or other seaside things. If you would like to submit a piece, we will need this by Sunday 19th July so that we can plan the layout and create the display the following week. We will create cards for each artist giving you credit and contact details (if you wish) to put by your piece and you can of course have it back after the exhibit too.
Building
The construction of our structure has been organised however we will no doubt be grateful for some assistance the week of 20th July with perhaps painting or putting the display together - we will probably plan one evening nearer the time with a good weather forecast to do this. If you would be keen to help at Steampunk with this please ping us an email.
Materials
Scottish Coastal Clean Up have no shortage of stuff from their beach cleans that can be used for the artworks and so we have arranged a couple of weekends where there will be a box of stuff at Steampunk that you can come and look through and take materials from. If there is anything in particular you would like to get a hold of, please email us and ask and Kerrie will see what she can do. You are also of course welcome to use your own beach finds in the artwork - the only specification is that it must be made out of recovered materials from our waterways.
The first drop off of SCCU litter will be this weekend the 13-14 June and the next one will be two weeks later on 4-5 July. This can be found on the Steampunk terrace.
Please get in touch via our contact form on this website if you wish to submit a piece of artwork or wish to be involved in any other capacity.
Thank you!
Cath