Beauty of Recycling – The Story

The result is a photographic work that reveals the unexpected beauty hidden in what we discard.

The Beauty of Recycling project began from a lifelong passion for photography and with a growing sense of disillusionment. After more than twenty-five years running a photography-related company in Finland and abroad, I witnessed firsthand the impact of economic decline. Layoffs, closures, and uncertainty became part of everyday life.

One comment stayed with me. A friend who had just lost her job said she felt as if she had been “thrown onto a landfill.” When my own company was affected, that image became deeply personal. The feeling of being discarded, of losing perceived value, began to shape my artistic thinking. How could I interpret through my camera lens that feeling. I had no idea whatsoever.

At first, I photographed aging doors, windows, and walls still in use. Gradually, my camera led me further, directly to landfills. There, among discarded oil barrels, steel beams, paint cans, broken lumber, metal scap, electronic waste I discovered something I had not expected – beauty.

“I went as close as possible to my subjects—into the pores of the objects. I was astonished by the richness of the details. The landfills became my place of pilgrimage. The mountains of waste my Mount Everest”.

Over five years, I spent hundreds of hours at multiple landfill sites. What I encountered was unsettling, yet revealing: how easily usable things are discarded once they fall out of fashion. How clearly social division becomes visible in what we throw away.

It became impossible not to draw parallels between objects and people. What happens to those who are laid off, to the elderly, to children and young people? Are they, too, treated as disposable?

Through my viewfinder, discarded objects began to tell stories. Every dent, scratch, vein, and scar carried meaning. The images are authentic. Nothing is staged. Shot exactly as I found the objects laying in piles of junk. In my camera viewfinder I cropped them to what I wanted them to be and what message they conveyed.

In this work, recycling is not only material but symbolic. Behind every discarded object lies not a wasted past, but the possibility of a hopeful future. The images are a tribute to dignity.

The work has received international recognition. The photographs have been published as coffee table books by the global recycling company Kuusakoski Oy, licensed for textiles for retail, used in publications and PR products. Exhibited in my home town, internationally in galleries and historic venues in Europe, the United States and Thailand.