Well another T.V. interview under my belt, I am beginning to enjoy this small taste of media spotlight. Check out the interview on: http://www.festivalfishbowl.com/

So begins the journey of adding discarded bits of paper and plastic to my art. My aim is to focus mostly on items that don't get recycled by local councils and usually end up in landfill. After about 2 weeks of collecting things like plastic wrapping from bread, fruit and chocolate from my own consumption I realised just how much normally ends up in my bin and this was just from one person. I do other things to reduce my waste like recycling, growing my own veggies, giving scraps to my chickens and dogs and composting but I still managed to collect a lot of waste on top of that. It made me realise just how big a problem waste is and it's effect on our natural environment.

How much is being chucked out in my suburb, in the city of Melbourne, Victoria or even Australia as a whole? What is being done about it and what can the average person do?
 
I know that there are people out there doing great things like creating websites to help people make their own waste reduction like Pedal People:
http://www.pedalpeople.com/index.php?page=43
or providing educational resources to help teach our children like Global Education: http://www.globaleducation.edu.au/teaching-activity/waste-matters-mp.html
or councils like Moreland City challenging their residents to go Zero Waste for a Week:
http://www.moreland.vic.gov.au/environment-and-waste/reduce-your-waste/zero-waste-challenge.html

But for most of us we are not doing enough if we want to preserve our natural environment and way of life. This is a joint problem between consumers and organisations but I do believe we can make a difference as individuals. So rather than tell people what they should do I decided to work on what I could do and combine it with something I was really passionate about, art. So Waste Beautification was conceived, I may need to work on that title.

For a long time now I have wanted to make my art environmentally friendly but I just didn't know what direction to take. I have done basic things like reduce my engery and water comsumption but that wasn't enough. What I really wanted to get involved with was somehow tackling the problem of waste. I dabbled with the idea of joinging or remoulding various plastics to create something beautiful but it all looked like shit so I gave up and went back to my painting. Recently I came up with the idea of embedding this plastic into my work. So I dabbled again and this time there was some success. I have now locked in an exhibition in Adelaide in March 2013 that involves this process in some way. So now I am commited to continue this journey of waste rebeautification.