It all started with a reflection I scratched into an old photo. It was the pinhole symbol that I have been using for years. I was looking for ways to promote the Pinhole Project, a fun initiative where I taught community members how to create cameras from their own garbage and take photographs. Garbage has been my artistic passion and my everyday concern.

As such, the everyday coffee cup, a fascinating material to work with, is to me the epitome of waste. The curve of the coffee cup makes beautifully distorted photographs. The coffee cup is everywhere, so easy to find; you don't even need to dig deep into a garbage can for it. So many are left standing around the numerous busy coffee shops in our cities.

People of all walks of life use it, rarely questioning. A cup on the go, three cups, four cups.... And while the coffee cup is not what mainly overflows our busy landfills, the very grasp of it by a human hand without a second thought is a symptom of a much bigger problem. More affectionately called 'rubbish', waste is our biggest product. Often talked about like a phenomenon of its own, it is rarely connected to the little steps we take in our daily journey. The coffee cup we use, the take out container, the can we neglect to recycle, the dollar store item, which lives in our house for mere months, yet takes more than a human lifetime to break down....

Reflections... on paper. My friend is looking at my diagrammatic abstract prints that I have printed on used coffee cups. I point her to a hidden meaning: the tree is reflected and turns into toilet paper, Kleenex box, an envelope. I tell her about my plan to set an art station in front of a coffee shop and get people to make prints on their used cups. She likes the idea but wonders if this would encourage people to waste less. Maybe they'd think it was cool that they were making a piece of art. She suggests I involve some element that clearly discourages waste.

The truth is I don't know what would make people waste less. As an artist I am fascinated with the problem only because I find it absurd as a human being. I don't think a little art project or even big government regulations will make people waste less. I know how to fight for dear life but don't know how to fight everyday life, how to reverse something so deeply entrenched that we don't even see it. Would a reflection register differently in our subconscious?