Litter Art: Keeping trash out of landfills and building community

Editor’s note (September 2026): This article looks back at A Greener Future’s 2021 Litter Art program, which invited local artists to transform cleanup debris into art.

Every day, people throw away a mix of plastics, food wrappers, clothing, food, electronics and personal-care products. Many of these materials can remain in landfills or the environment for years.

Unfortunately, many of these trashed items pose long-term problems for everyone involved. Only 9% of plastics will ever be recycled and many of our plastics will be shipped to other countries, shifting the environmental burden to them. We’re also running out of landfill space and cannot keep up with our current levels of waste.

Litter from clean ups organized by A Greener Future.

What’s worse is that much of the waste we create ends up as litter. Every year, A Greener Future coordinates more than 100 litter cleanups along the shores of Lake Ontario through our Love Your Lakes project. To date, we’ve picked up ~1,000,000 pieces of litter through this program alone!

So what do we do with all of this litter we collect?

In 2021, we partnered with ten local artists through our Litter Art program to raise awareness about litter and build community in a new way.

Former litter in storage, awaiting artists.

After seeing the impact that waste is having on our local environments, we came up with this idea to help us repurpose the litter we were finding and to keep it out of landfills for as long as possible!

Green Storage, a company dedicated to creating environmentally friendly storage spaces across North America, has been instrumental in this project. For the past few months, we have been dropping off beach debris that is fit for creating art at the Green Storage location on Eastern Avenue in Toronto. This is the most central location for all of our artists to meet up and grab supplies.

All of the Green Storage locations include solar energy generation, electric vehicle charging stations, e-waste disposal, low-flush toilets, and LED lighting. The lights inside are run on motion sensors so the lights aren’t continuously on. Overall there couldn’t be a more fitting storage facility for A Greener Future to partner with.

Outside of Green Storage.

The artists used recovered litter to create work that encouraged people to look differently at waste, pollution and their relationship with Lake Ontario.