Last updated on June 7, 2026.
Many attractive, deliberate, thought-provoking art installations use reclaimed ocean and beach plastic, plastic collected from trashed landscapes, and other upcycled disposable materials. I’m presenting a selection to show how some people are using art to spread the message about plastics in our environment. Below are some of the art installations I’ve found online and in my travels. I’ll be sure to add this page as I discover more inspirational art. Last, check out my Pinterest board on Plastic Art Projects. Enjoy!
“Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans.” -Jacques-Yves Cousteau
“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.” -Edgar Degas
Washed Ashore
This organization started in 2010 when Angela Haseltine Pozzi, an artist, asked volunteers to help her clean up beach trash. She used the plastic trash to create large sculptures and use them to educate people about trash, plastic, and ocean pollution. These works are nothing short of amazing, beautiful, and uplifting! Pozzi designs the sculptures and leads school workshops. Volunteers collect trash from the beach, and then clean, sort, and assist with construction. Check out their website.
Benjamin Von Wong
This art installation, showing spewing plastics sourced from Kibera (the largest slum in Africa) greeted delegates from 193 countries that attended the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA) 5.2 where they discussed the future of plastics and a Global Plastic Treaty. It was created by international artist and activist Benjamin Von Wong, who “enlisted the help of the Human Needs Project (HNP), a local NGO providing essential services and opportunities to people living in some of the harshest conditions in the world. The build-out of the installation provided temporary jobs for over 100 residents from the slums of Kibera, an underserved community the size of Central Park with 1.2 Million residents located just 10 miles from the United Nations headquarters. Plastics were sourced from the informal waste sector, sanitized, and tied together before being brought to the pristine fields of the United Nations.”1
North Carolina Aquarium at Pine Knoll Shores
I discovered this piece near the interior entrance of the North Carolina Aquarium at Pine Knoll Shores in Pine Knoll Shores, North Carolina. I took my son there on a rainy day while visiting my best friend in North Carolina. This representation of a blue marlin made from trash, of course, made me gasp with excitement! It was really cool and one of the first pieces I encountered in person!
Tennessee Aquarium
The Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga, Tennessee has had at least one traveling exhibit featuring art pieces from Washed Ashore. The Aquarium has a couple of exhibits on plastic pollution and many on the importance of conservation. Here is a plastic art piece in one of their permanent exhibits:
Creative Discovery Museum
The Creative Discovery Museum in Chattanooga, Tennessee has two different areas where children can create art from traditional mediums and/or upcycled materials. This art installation in their art gallery is a flower garden of sorts. All of the “flowers” were made from plastic bottles that were collected, cleaned, spray-painted, cut, and assembled. Isn’t it gorgeous and inspiring? Imagine it from a child’s perspective!
Freedom Park and Sculpture Garden, Camano Island, WA
This orca sculpture on Camano Island was created by a group of 6th graders for a class project. Those kids gathered, cleaned, and created this sculpture with the help of a metalworker artist, and all of the trash was collected from the island’s shoreline. Quoted in an article about the piece, one of the students said, “I hope that people will look at Greyson the Whale and think all that plastic was in the water and will try to use less plastic.”2
I love this sculpture!
Monterey Bay Aquarium’s blue whale art installation
Installation by the Monterey Bay Aquarium in partnership with other organizations, by artists Joel Dean Stockdill and Yustina Salnikova. “The whale is made mostly of single-use plastic trash. It’s the stuff people think is being recycled, but often isn’t: Grocery bags, milk jugs, laundry detergent containers, bubble wrapping, produce bags, etc. We spent months collecting, sorting, cleaning, shredding, heating, and molding the plastic to create the whale you see in front of you. Every nine minutes 300,000 pounds of plastic—the weight of a blue whale — makes its way into the ocean. To draw attention to this enormous problem, we built a life-sized blue whale from discarded single-use plastic.”3
Pam Longobardi, Drifters Project
Pam Longobardi wrote: “In 2006, after discovering the mountainous piles of plastic debris the ocean was depositing on the remote shores of Hawaii, I began collecting and utilizing this plastic as my primary material in my project called Drifters. Since then, I have made scores of interventions, cleaning beaches and making collections from all over the world, removing tens of thousands of pounds of material from the natural environment and re-situating it within social and cultural contexts for examination.”
“Plastic objects are the cultural archeology of our time.” -Pam Longobardi4
This short film, Plastic Free Island, featuring artists Pam Longobardi and Dianna Cohen, “examines the mobilization of an entire island in Greece to address its plastic pollution problem. Five years in the making, this film documents the synergy of two artist-directed networks, Drifters Project and Plastic Pollution Coalition in the development of a template of social and artistic engagement of the island of Kefalonia, Greece.”5
Max Liboiron
This artist engages with communities to construct thought-provoking pieces about trash and waste. “Academic, activist and artist Max Liboiron directs a marine science and technology laboratory specializing in citizen science and grassroots environmental monitoring of plastic pollution. Her scholarly works feeds her artwork, and, seemingly, vice versa.”6 The piece above is called Founder/Worker: “visitors are invited to build part of a miniature New York City out of trash. Participants can them make a choice about what kind of credit they’d like for their work: cultural or monetary. They can either record their names in a book as a Volunteer Founder of the city, and their name will always be cited with this piece. Or, they can choose to be paid $5 as an Anonymous Worker.”7
Liboiron has another project called Seeing Like a Scientist that looks at the gastrointestinal tracts of animals and birds. Dinner Plates looks at the contents of the Northern Fulmar’s stomach, which contains some plastic. “All of the hard and plastic-like objects are removed from the bird’s guts, put in a petri dish, and analyzed under a microscope. This is what we see. Some is plastic, some is not.”8 Fascinating!
Ana Pêgo and Luis Quinta
This sculpture of the skeleton of a baleen whale was put together in 2014 by marine biologist Ana Pêgo and photographer Luis Quinta, with the support of the Almada City Council in Portugal. It is about 30 feet long and constructed of white plastic objects collected from the beach. “Whales are the largest animals on the planet. This one represents one of the biggest problems of our time,” Pêgo wrote.9 Here is a video about the process:
The Container Recycling Institute
The Container Recycling Institute (CRI) did an art installation in 2017 to represent the number of recyclable beverage containers consumed by a single person each year. I’ve always argued that these are the most common single-use disposable items found during litter clean-ups, so I was quite excited by this project!
Here’s another art installation by the CRI representing that only 32% of beverage containers actually get recycled. Love the dolphins!
Sheila Rogers
Sheila Rogers is a beachcomber and used to collect shells from beaches around the world. Over time, she found that plastic replaced the abundance of shells. “My new spiritual routine became gathering and cleaning the plastic debris, and ultimately making art objects from this material,” she wrote. “The heart of my work is environmental advocacy, seductively exposing the real and devastating effects of plastic pollution on the world’s oceans. The intent of my work is to raise awareness of this pressing consumer and environmental issue, while motivating viewers toward a plastic-use reduction revolution.”10
Skyscraper the Bruges Whale by STUDIOKCA
This project is super impressive! This company picked up beach and ocean plastics, sorted and cleaned the plastics, and engineered and assembled them into a 4-story whale art installation.11
This is the video from their successful 2018 Kickstarter:
Beautifully done!
Over Flow at Lisbon’s Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, Portugal
Paris-based artist Tadashi Kawamata has created a monumental installation of ocean plastic. The large-scale commission is made up of plastic waste with boats, collected on the country’s coastline by a volunteer clean-up group. The exhibition, commissioned by the Portuguese museum, was created to spotlight the problem of plastic waste in the oceans.
Plastic Ocean, Imaginarium 2016
A recreation of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch by Artist Tan Zi Xi. Composed of 26,000 pieces of non-biodegradable plastic items, this installation mimics the sensation of floating in a sea of trash.
Ophelia the Octopus, created by High School Students
Art students at Kodiak High School in Alaska created an octopus sculpture out of marine debris to generate public awareness of plastics in the ocean. High School students did this – wow!
The World of Litter by Peter Smith
Dutch artist and founder of the KLEAN foundation Peter Smith made a globe of plastic trash in 2012 from what he collected on the streets of Amsterdam, to call attention in the Netherlands to the plastic soup problem. Here’s a video that explains Smith’s goals and process:
Mermaid washed ashore in plastic bottles
Benjamin Von Wong photographed a mermaid, washed ashore in a sea of 10,000 plastic bottles, as a way to make the plastic pollution problem more interesting to people. He made a video about his purpose and process:
Ocean Sole
Ever thought about all of those cheap flip-flops people wear and inevitably throw away? Many are made from plastic and end up in waterways and the oceans, even on the East African coast. The Ocean Sole organization, a social enterprise, collects flip-flops on the coast of Kenya and upcycles them into colorful sculptures to sell and support the local economy. They upcycle about 400,000 flip-flops and sandals annually. That’s a lot of plastic not staying in the ocean. What a great venture!
Rabbit Rabbit Sculpture by Robert Bradford
This is another inspiring piece: A rabbit sculpture made from toys.
Are there art projects featuring plastics and other discarded materials that you’d like to share? Please leave a comment or use the contact me form to tell me about them!
Thanks for reading.
Additional Resources:
Page, “12 Inspiring Works of Art on Plastic Pollution,” Plastic Pollution Collection, May 2, 2017.
Article, “On The Oregon Coast, Turning Pollution Into Art With A Purpose,” NPR.org, December 4, 2019.
Article, ” San Francisco artist turns trashed toys into plastic art panels,” abc7news.com, February 7, 2020.
Footnotes:
- Page, “#TurnOffthePlasticTap,” accessed January 27, 2025. ↩︎
- Article, “Camano students collect debris, transform it into art,” HeraldNet, September 6, 2015. ↩︎
- Page, “Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Blue Whale Art Installation Accessibility Signs,” Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, accessed January 30, 2022. ↩︎
- Page, “About,” Drifters Project, accessed August 8, 2024. ↩︎
- Page, “Plastic Free Island,” plasticfreeisland.com, accessed August 30, 2024. ↩︎
- Book, Life Without Plastic: The Practical Step-by-Step Guide to Avoiding Plastic to Keep Your Family and the Planet Healthy, by Chantal Plamondon and Jay Sinha, Page Street Publishing, Salem, MA, 2017. ↩︎
- Page, “Founder/Worker,” maxliboiron.com, accessed August 8, 2024; no longer active as of April 2025. ↩︎
- Page, “Dinner Plates (Northern Fulmar),” maxliboiron.com, accessed August 8, 2024. ↩︎
- Book, Plasticus Maritimus: An Invasive Species, by Ana Pêgo and Isabel Minhós Martins, Greystone Kids, Vancouver, 2020. ↩︎
- Page, “Artist Statement,” sheilarogersfineart.com, accessed August 8, 2024. ↩︎
- Article, “Whale made from plastic waste leaps out of canal,” newatlas.com, June 27, 2018. ↩︎