Modern society is obsessed with convenience and we need not look further than our personal trash to find evidence of our compulsion to waste. From parking lots and city streets to national parks and highways, human waste can be found littered everywhere. Water bottles, bottle caps, single-use containers, tires, lost objects, car parts, and kids' toys are just a few of the hundreds of thousands of items discarded every day. Many people have taken notice of our faults and, in an effort, to bring about social change, discarded materials have become aesthetic elements for the creative.  The context of everyday reality has moved artist to find new meanings in the wasteful artifact's society has generated. Contemporary artists are using discarded items figuratively and literally to make metaphors about life and the state of the world.  Plagued by excess, contemporary artists have found many ways to turn to our waste to make art with the discarded.