Dutch artist reveals delicate beauty that can be found in garbage

Schaap composes these delicate photographs using plastic waste found on Cape Town’s Clifton Beach. Each of her images is arranged within moments using pastel-hued paper as a background. She scours the beach, collecting handfuls of discarded items and groups them together according to their colours. In her view, plastic straws, clumps of fishing wire and rubber flip-flops present an opportunity for beauty which should not to be overlooked.

Speaking to i-D, Schaap describes the moment that spurred her on to start Plastic Ocean as an ongoing project. After witnessing how colourful debris would wash onto the local beach like decorative flecks of shrapnel among the sand, Schaap decided to move.

"It was like confetti, like there'd been a birthday," she says, "It made me realise what we've done."

Though ethereal and pretty, Schaap’s Plastic Ocean represents the real ecological danger of our global obsession with plastic products. She aims to turn some of her flotsam photographs into instructive posters to be distributed among coastal wildlife organisations, to help beach-goers identify and recycle different types of plastic waste on their own. By the same token, Schaap’s work is a noteworthy exercise on how preciousness can be made from nothing for a good cause.