A city asked its residents to save their garbage on purpose. Bottle caps, broken toys, cracked buckets, anything plastic. Then a Portuguese artist showed up and turned the pile into three foxes.
The artist who builds with what gets thrown out
Bordalo II is the name Artur Bordalo works under, a Lisbon-born artist who has spent the last decade-plus assembling animals out of whatever a city throws away. Tires, car parts, dead appliances, aluminum cans, and mountains of plastic go into his sculptures, which he builds at mural scale directly onto walls and boardwalks. The project is called Big Trash Animals, and the message is blunt by design: this is what overconsumption actually looks like, shaped into the wildlife it is killing. Between 2012 and 2022 alone he used more than 60 tons of waste to build roughly 200 of these pieces around the world.
New Jersey gives him the material
The Asbury Park Arts Council partnered with the Wooden Walls Public Art Project to bring Bordalo II to the Jersey Shore. Before he even arrived in October 2025, his team sent local organizers a list of species with a real connection to the area and a shopping list of plastic trash needed to build one. Local businesses, nonprofits, and residents collected the material themselves. Bordalo picked foxes. Not the animal most people associate with a beach town, but foxes are common up and down the Jersey Shore, and a family of three gave him room to build something with actual narrative weight instead of a single mounted head.
Built from what the neighborhood didn't want
The finished piece sits inside the Wooden Walls Project's mural district on the Asbury Park boardwalk, a stretch of the shore that has spent years turning abandoned surfaces into a rotating outdoor gallery. Every panel of the fox family is assembled from the specific batch of plastic waste the community handed over, which means the sculpture is literally made of Asbury Park's own trash rather than material shipped in from somewhere else. That is the whole point of the project: the town has to look at its own garbage every time it looks at the art.
Still standing a year later
Brooklyn Street Art checked back in on the sculpture in its May 31, 2026 roundup and confirmed the trio of foxes is still standing strong after a year on the boardwalk, holding up against salt air and boardwalk foot traffic well past the usual shelf life of a temporary installation. That durability matters for a project built entirely from repurposed plastic. It is one thing to make a point about waste with a sculpture that lasts a season. It is another to have it still greeting boardwalk crowds a full year later, weather and all.
Bordalo II has never treated these pieces as one-off stunts. Each one is a local negotiation: what animal, whose trash, which wall. Asbury Park's answer was three foxes built from its own boardwalk waste, and for now, they are winning the fight against the ocean air.
Related reading from TasteBueno
- Damien Hirst Spent 30 Years Preserving Sharks in Tanks. His Newest Show Put a Space Invader in One.
- Two Sao Paulo Twins Painted Their Dreams Yellow. Their Characters Have Since Covered a Boeing 737 and Six Grain Silos.
- KAWS Learned to Rob Bus Shelters in San Francisco in 1995. Thirty Years Later, SFMOMA Gave Him the Roof.
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