A classic mid-century roadside motel in Las Vegas has been turned into a fantastically colorful habitat for a series of huge animals, constructed from waste collected from dumpsters, abandoned factories and scrap yards.

This 10,000-square-foot zoo parody (dubbed ‘Wild Wild Waste’) by artist Bordalo II is his biggest installation to date. It’s designed to make statements about the commodification of animal habitats as well as human waste production and management activities.

“Bordalo is inspired by the rejected, the broken, the wasted, somehow our everyday,” explains the exhibit’s curator. “With the trash we refuse to be responsible for he creates a fantastic installation that is playful and, furthermore that question our relation to waste and our responsibility.”

The animals are simultaneously visible as a whole and a set of parts. A flock of penguins emerges from plastic cubes, car parts morph into a family of pandas, while a whale caught in a fishing net and lion caged in a truck further highlight ideas of confinement.

“We were so humbled to have the opportunity to help host the art of bordalo at life is beautiful this past weekend,” said one of the organizers. “The entire installation’s emotional nature gave us all a little lesson in doing more with less in our work and in our environment.”

When an Amsterdam-based startup announced last year that it was training crows to pick up cigarette butts in exchange for food, the concept seemed a little ridiculous, but not because crows aren’t smart enough to pull it off. Corvids are among the most intelligent animals in the world, routinely shocking scientists with their reasoning skills, and they’re already known for snatching cigarettes right out of people’s hands. It’s the concept of training animals to clean up our messes that has many people shaking their heads, though it’s arguably a symbiotic transaction.

As it turns out, we don’t even have to wait for the results of the Crowded Cities experiment, which uses a ‘crow vending machine’ to reward the birds for collecting and depositing cigarette butts. A French theme park called Puy du Fou began its own crow cleanup crew project, employing six birds to pick up butts and other bits of rubbish and insert them into a small box.

“The goal is not just to clear up, because the visitors are generally careful to keep things clean,” says Nicolas de Villiers, head of the park. It’s also about proving “that nature itself can teach us to take care of the environment.”

The crows received their training from the park’s “Academy of Falconry,” and the pickup project is inspired by the park’s falconry show, in which crows retrieve roses and deliver them to a “princess” in a castle. The falconer keeps an eye on the situation to make sure tourists don’t drop trash just for the crows to retrieve, and keeps the birds from cheating by dropping objects other than trash into the box.

Top image: Steve Baker via Flickr CC by 2.0

A fresh new type of park-on-the-water in Rotterdam is turned plastic trash that once polluted the area into a series of hexagonal pods now open to the public. The design is built to scale, too — more units can be added as more waste is recovered.

The floating landscape is meant to raise awareness, but also provides a practical resting spot for people, as well as a refuge and breeding ground for snails, flatworms, beatles and fish — each pod has its on purpose, be it benches for humans or soil for plants and animals.

The artificial island chain was built by the Recycled Island Foundation, an organization that takes trash from the mouths of rivers using litter traps and reuses what they can. These traps are designed to catch and keep what passes by, even as the currents of the rivers change.

“When we retrieve the plastics directly in our cities and ports we actively prevent the further growth of the plastic soup in our seas and oceans. The realization of the building blocks in recycled plastics is an important step towards a litter free river.”

Down in the dumps? These dozen decorated dumpsters are sure to turn your mood from crappy to happy thanks to their distinctively un-trashy artistic makeovers.

Becoming the pick of the litter, so to speak, when it comes to artistically enhanced dumpster bins is achieved when the artist’s vision is expressed in words as well as imagery. Take the “Barbie Dream Dumpster”, snapped by Flickr member Rusty Blazenhoff in the summer of 2013. Some complementary pastel colors and a Barbie-font stencil were all the anonymous artist needed to create a succinct commentary on the current state of the American dream. Right you are, Ken!

Oscar Winner

More toward the opposite end of the spectrum is this riveting portrayal of Oscar the Grouch from Sesame Street. Snapped by Flickr member bella (bella.m) in Toronto during the summer of 2015, this “oscar winning” dumpster looks more like a jumbo kids’ toy box than a dolled-up waste depository. Mind you, even the most beautifully decorated dumpsters still stink.

President Dump

“Anything’s a dumpster if you’re brave enough,” said President Abraham Lincoln like, never. This Los Angeles dumpster features an improbable Lincoln-Manson mashup with a little Bob Marley to add spice. An unknown number of graffiti artists tagging over an indeterminate amount of time results in a unique and unanticipated form of urban expression.

Bonus Bones Bin

Who can say why this breathtaking skeletal flying horse was pasted or stenciled to the side of a lowly NYC dumpster, or for that matter who’s responsible… we’re just glad it’s there for the wider world to appreciate. Kudos also to Flickr member shoehorn99 for snapping and posting the spectral stallion in late 2006.

5 Pointz Landing

Space is at a premium at 5 Pointz, “the Institute of Higher Burnin'” in Long Island City, NY so not even the dumpsters get a free pass. These minimalist painted dumpsters snapped by Flickr member Wally Gobetz (wallyg) in the summer of 2007 stand out through their comparative “restraint” in the midst of rampant tagging.

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Has Bins 15 More Street Artistic Trash Dumpsters

Working to raise awareness of litter, Buttsy builds sculptural collages out of found objects, with a strong emphasis on some of the most toxic offenders: cigarette butts. Like Banksy, he works quietly and invisibly in the night.

They may seem small, but butts create over one and a half billion pounds of trash per year. And while society has gotten better about shaming those who toss them on the street, we could still do more. To that end, Buttsy has begun shaping butts out of butts, as it were.

“A lot of my friends and people who work in my industry [advertising] smoke, and they just leave their butts everywhere,” Landon Beamer, a.k.a. Buttsy, told the CityPages. “I think that for some reason they don’t see it as trash, but I’ve been very aware of it. That’s why I decided to find a way to make people look at their butts differently.”

Based in Minnesota, Beamer has put out dozens of work around the Twin Cities, tying into different pop culture themes and using what he finds along the way. He has also lived in Boston and Seattle, and is considering taking his project on the road — and anywhere he goes, there are sure to be butts.