Literally popping out of city walls in three dimensions, wild animals emerge from a jumble of car parts, corrugated metal and random industrial objects masterfully layered and painted by Bordalo II. The Portuguese street artist has spent much of the last decade installing these giant murals in the streets of his hometown of Lisbon and other locales around the world, literally infusing new life into the stuff we’ve deemed junk and tossed away. Several new pieces have emerged in recent months, including a possum in Ft. Smith, Arkansas and a flying squirrel in Estonia.

Each of Bordalo’s sculptures grows in an almost organic fashion depending on what kind of trash the artist can find on the streets near his installation location. As you can probably imagine, he has no trouble accumulating more materials than he can handle just with a quick trip driving around a few city blocks. Certain materials, like tires, are preferred because they’re easy to cut and shape.

Like so many street artists, Bordalo started out making illegal street graffiti, and his style emerged over time as he began to integrate 3D objects into the paint. “Even if in the beginning it was all about exploring and discovering the way to do, the way to make it work, I’m still trying to innovate, create new problems and have fun with them – this is the process that creates different expressions, forms, textures, etc.,” he says in an interview with Street Art News.

Take a look through Bordalo’s Instagram for more projects, and see if you can identify all the individual elements that go into each piece.

Centuries ago, there was very little garbage, but the little bits of this and that buried in the ground are now fascinating visual clues to a life long gone. Trash today is much easier to find – especially in the urban jungle of New York City, where it’s hard to walk ten steps without seeing litter on the ground.

But artist Justin Gignac still sees stories even in the ubiquity, and is out to prove that with some clever package design, Manhattan’s refuse can be art. Gignac sells plastic cubes of trash from the Big Apple for $50 a pop.

“I sell garbage. I scour New York City streets picking up trash. After filling bags with subway passes, Broadway tickets, and other NYC junk, I carefully arrange plastic cubes full of the stuff. Each box is unique and won’t leak or smell. The cubes are then signed, numbered, and dated, making them perfect for anyone who wants their own piece of the NYC landscape,” Gignac told Geekologie.

To some – especially New Yorkers – Gignac’s work seems a bizarre testament to the fact that there’s a buyer for absolutely everything imaginable, no matter how worthless it may seem.  But to those for whom New York City is a far-away, almost mythical modern metropolis, it could be a strange little slice of a life totally unlike their own.

It’s a little bit Andy Warhol, a little bit street-corner-junk-hawker and a whole lot of kitsch, but it’s clearly a hit – over 1,200 NYC Garbage cubes have been sold to buyers in 25 countries. And, after all, perhaps part of what collectors of these strange gems are paying for is a public service: that much less trash on the streets of one of the world’s most magnificent cities.

Why waste money and add to the world’s usable waste by buying art materials when there are so many strange and interesting objects out there to use for design projects instead? From small found objects to entire abandoned houses, the sky is the limit when it comes to the palettes of these amazing trash artists. Their subject matter is about as varied as their material choices, ranging from self-portraiture and crushed can paintings to imitations of Monet’s masterpieces and gigantic sculpture parks.

Tom Deininger is no doubt one of the most creative and versatile trash artists in the world. His collages viewed from a distance seem like they could be made of anything – and they are indeed made out of just about everything he can find. He “majored in women, art and surfing” at college and “learned little about all three” by his own humorous admission. About a decade ago he moved to Rhode Island and started toying with found objects as artistic materials. In addition to creating his junk art Tom also lectures at local schools and colleges and creates canvas paintings.

Nek Chand Saini‘s undeniable opus is his 1.7 million square-foot Rock Garden in Chandigarh – much of which he built on his own secretly and in his spare time. For years while working as a building inspector Chand reused found materials to begin constructing a remote complex of courtyards and sculptures out of pottery, concrete and other recycled materials. Since these constructions took place on a conserved plot of state-owned land they were nearly destroyed once discovered. The public came to his support, however, and rather than having his constructions torn down he was given workers and a salary to do his work with the official blessings of the city. His works have since traveled the world.

Tyree Guyton began the Heidelberg Project decades ago with the help of family, friends and neighborhood kids. As they cleaned up the streets of their area they began reusing the refuse they collected to fill the area with art. Deserted houses became massive sculptures and canvases, trees turned into places to hang strange found objects and dead lawns were developed into sculpture pedestals. Despite the destruction of many of these works by the city the project persists in the community. This project has breathed life and color into a city in need of both.

Elizabeth Lundberg gathers objects of a kind and recycles them into artwork that is sometimes serious, sometimes silly (such as a basket made of baseballs … get it? A ballbasket!). By changing the use of objects she encourages us to question their meaning and our relationship to them. Trained at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in mixed media and North Carolina State University in environmental design, Elizabeth has had her trash art featured in shows around the country.

Charles Kaufman makes one kind of art … but he makes it well. His crushed can works involve flattened beer and soda cans which he paints by hand and then mounts individually. Of course, both the painting itself (being hand-done) and the can’s particular shape (being hand-crushed) is entirely unique. Aside from his crushed can works he also paints with a similarly engaging color palette and likewise cartoonish flare.

Chris Jordan‘s Running the Numbers series is not so much art made from trash as art representing the amazing impact of garbage and astounding scale of waste on our planet. The collection of portraits each takes on a single subject from office paper to aluminum cans and shows the quantities visually used by different industries or in varying specific circumstances (e.g. the number of plastic cups used on airlines every year). He makes these abstractly large numbers comprehensible by rendering them visual. Of his work, Chris says that by “employing themes such as the near versus the far, and the one versus the many, I hope to raise some questions about the role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.”

Gugger Petter has been obsessively creating works of two- and three-dimensional art from ordinary newspaper for decades. She applies lacquers to preserve these otherwise fragile works of art and selections different sections to achieve the colors, blacks and whites for specific areas of each work. She also sometimes paints the newspapers but often leaves them as they are. Her subjects are generally as typical and everyday as her materials – simple portraits of daily life.

Previously: Innovative Trash Art