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.