Wow, now this is interesting and a bit scary. Beach restoration? Well, taken on steroids, this is called land reclamation, and in the United States, it is limited to doing precisely that: rebuilding land that got lost in storms such as hurricanes, because it got ripped away into the sea. But, elsewhere in the world, people who practice the tech means to this end are much more pragmatic. They use the tech of giant ships that suck in dirt and dump them elsewhere not just for the process of rebuilding lost land, but also for creating entirely new land and islands.
The scariest part about this is China’s practice. They have used it to expand their claim of a chain of Pacific islands by building entirely new land around their claimed ownership, then by building a military base on it. China is by far the biggest practitioner of building entirely new land out in the sea, dumping and moving around far more dirt than anyone else.
20200613/https://getpocket.com/explore/item/aboard-the-giant-sand-sucking-ships-that-china-uses-to-reshape-the-world