Bordalo II is a Portuguese street artist who builds huge animal sculptures out of rubbish: old car bumpers, tyres, broken appliances, plastic crates, cans and pipes, screwed to walls and finished with spray paint. His long-running series, known as Big Trash Animals, turns the very waste that harms wildlife into portraits of the creatures most affected by it. Seen from across the street, you see a fox, a bee or a pelican; walk closer and the animal breaks apart into dashboards, hoses and bottle crates.
Born Artur Bordalo in Lisbon in 1987, he took the name Bordalo II in honour of his grandfather, the painter Artur Real Bordalo. He started painting graffiti as a child, studied painting at the University of Lisbon’s fine arts faculty, and began the trash animals in Łódź, Poland, in 2015. Since then they have appeared across Portugal and in cities such as Barcelona, Dresden, Hamburg, Tallinn and Turin, as well as in North and Latin America. He calls himself an “artivist”, and by one estimate he had used more than 60 tonnes of waste on around 200 animals by 2022.
Below are thirty of his pieces, grouped by type of animal, with notes on what each shows and why it matters.
How the trash animals are made
Bordalo works with discarded material such as old tyres, wrecked car parts, broken appliances, plastic waste and cans, sorting it by colour and shape. The pieces are cut and screwed onto a wall or a frame so that the natural curve of a bumper becomes a cheek, a coil of hose becomes a tail, and a row of plastic slats becomes fur. Paint is used sparingly, mostly to bring out eyes, noses and colour patterns, so the original objects stay recognisable.
That double reading is the point. The animal is beautiful from a distance, and the closer you get, the more you see the stuff people throw away every day. The work asks viewers to connect the two: much of this waste ends up in rivers, oceans and fields, the habitats of the very animals on the wall.
Wild mammals
Fox
A curled-up fox sleeps across the bodywork of a scrapped car, its tail made from rusty orange panels. Red foxes are among the most adaptable mammals on earth and often live alongside people, scavenging in towns. Placing one on a wrecked car is a neat comment on how wildlife now shares space with our discarded machines.
Weasel
A long brown-and-white weasel stretches along a corrugated fence, built from bent strips of wood and metal. Weasels are small, fast hunters of mice and voles, which makes them useful neighbours for farmers. The sculpture’s low, horizontal pose fits the animal’s slinky body shape perfectly.
Hedgehog
Pale plastic shards form the spines of this giant hedgehog on a bright green wall. Hedgehog numbers have fallen sharply in parts of Europe, and litter is one of their hazards: they can get stuck in cans, plastic rings and netting. The hedgehog’s button eyes are made from round car parts, painted glossy black.
Flying squirrel (close-up)
This close-up shows the face of a flying squirrel peering over a branch of real-looking pine needles made from green plastic. Its oversized eyes are built from round lamp housings. Flying squirrels are nocturnal, which is why they have such large eyes.
Flying squirrel
Seen in full, the same flying squirrel climbs a whole building corner above a wall of posters, with motorbikes parked below. Despite the name, flying squirrels glide rather than fly, using a skin membrane stretched between their legs. The scale of the piece shows how Bordalo uses architecture as part of the composition.
Wolf
A huge grey wolf’s head fills the front of a building, with a man and a child standing at its base for scale. The wolf is made from metal sheets, appliance parts and spray-painted plastics. Wolves have returned to parts of Europe after centuries of persecution, but they still face conflict with farmers and habitat loss.
Meerkats
Four meerkats stand on guard on a turquoise wall, their bodies built from brown planks and plastic parts. In the wild, meerkats take turns acting as sentinels while the group forages. The sculpture captures that alert, upright posture.
Opossum
An opossum peers down from the brick wall of a shopfront on what appears to be an American high street, made mostly from grey and white scrap. The Virginia opossum is North America’s only marsupial. Bordalo’s North American pieces often feature local animals that people overlook.
Lynx
This lynx stares straight at the viewer with yellow eyes, its tufted ears and whiskers made from strips of plastic and wire. The Iberian lynx of Spain and Portugal was once one of the world’s most endangered cats and has recovered thanks to conservation work. Bordalo made a large Iberian lynx for Lisbon’s Parque das Nações in 2019.
Lynx (face detail)
A close look at the lynx shows how the fur is built from overlapping shards of dark plastic. The whiskers are thin white rods, likely cable or wire. Up close, it is very hard to tell where the animal ends and the rubbish begins.
Badger
A badger’s striped face emerges from an old green metal cabinet. The stripes are made from pale and black plastic, with a mesh panel for texture. Badgers are mostly nocturnal diggers, and many are killed on roads every year.
Deer
A young deer looks out from a blue wall, its antlers made from ribbed flexible pipes. A person stands at the bottom, which shows how tall the piece is. Deer are frequent victims of road traffic and of discarded netting and wire in the countryside.
Goat
A wild goat with long, curved horns bursts out of a green painted crate, its beard made from moss-like material. The horns are built from coiled black hose. Mountain goats and ibex have been reintroduced to several European ranges after hunting nearly wiped them out.
Pets and town animals
Trash kitten
A kitten with huge green eyes sits on its haunches beside a seated man, who looks tiny next to it. Its fur is made from scrap metal and pale plastic, painted against a bright green-and-yellow background. Domestic cats are loved pets, yet free-roaming cats are also a major threat to birds and small wildlife.
Trash puppy
A floppy-eared puppy rests its chin on the ground, with a man on a ladder beside it for scale. It is built from car parts and plastic in brown and white. The sleepy pose makes the material it is made of feel even more poignant.
Mouse
A wall-mounted mouse made of grey plastic and metal grips a white wooden frame with its pink paws. Its big round eye is a shiny black hubcap or lamp. Mice thrive wherever humans leave food waste, so a mouse made from rubbish is a fitting choice.
Rat
A giant grey rat with a long pink tail is shown in a gallery setting, with visitors standing beside it. Rats follow human waste closely, and cities with poor rubbish collection have larger rat populations. The scale makes a usually hidden animal impossible to ignore.
Pig
A pig lies on its side in a rusty, abandoned-looking room, built from metal plates and pink-painted scrap. Pigs are intelligent animals, and the piece invites viewers to think about how farm animals are raised. The decayed setting matches the materials.
Reptiles and amphibians
Iguana
A bright green iguana runs along a yellow warehouse wall, its spines and scales made from cut plastic. Its tail curls around the corner of the building. Iguanas are native to the tropical Americas and are often captured for the pet trade.
Yellow frog
A golden frog with huge glossy eyes sits in an alcove between two brick walls. Frogs and other amphibians are among the most threatened animal groups in the world, hit by habitat loss, pollution and disease. Their thin skin makes them especially sensitive to chemicals in water.
Chameleon
A chameleon made from green metal and plastic grips a branch, its tail curled into a tight spiral. The eye is a round car part painted with a pupil. Chameleons can move each eye independently, a detail the large round eye playfully hints at.
Salamander
A black-and-orange salamander lies on a painted blue pool in a public square, with a visitor photographing it. The colouring suggests the fire salamander, whose bright markings warn predators of its toxic skin. Salamanders need clean, damp habitats, so they suffer quickly when streams are polluted.
Birds and sea life
Pelican
A pelican is attached to the rusting hull of a beached ship standing in turquoise water. Seabirds like pelicans can swallow plastic or get tangled in fishing line. Using a shipwreck as the canvas ties the work directly to marine pollution.
Flamingos
Two pink flamingos wade in a shallow stream among reeds, built from pink-painted metal and plastic on thin legs. Flamingos get their colour from pigments in the algae and shrimp they eat. Their dependence on clean shallow water makes them vulnerable to wetland pollution.
Penguin
A tall penguin covers the green facade of a building, with its orange neck patch suggesting a king or emperor penguin. Bordalo later made Magellanic penguins for the Portuguese pavilion at Expo 2020 Dubai. Penguins face threats from overfishing, oil spills and warming seas.
Filthy whale
A whale made from grey scrap lies on a floor of green plastic waste in a small room lit in green. Whales are known to swallow plastic, and stranded whales have been found with stomachs full of it. The cramped setting makes the animal look trapped in our rubbish.
Insects and small creatures
Bee
A giant honeybee clings to a yellow-green wall, its striped body built from orange and black plastic and its wings from transparent sheets and wire. Bees pollinate a large share of the crops people eat. Pesticides and loss of wildflowers have caused worrying declines in many bee species.
Snail
A snail with a spiral shell made from a coiled red tyre or hose crawls up a green wall. Its eye stalks are made from flexible tubing. The slow snail is a gentle reminder that nature does not recover quickly from damage.
Caterpillar (Trasherpillar)
A bright green and yellow caterpillar wraps around the corner of a modern building in front of a painted forest scene. Its bristles are made from thin black rods. Caterpillars are the larvae of butterflies and moths, whose numbers have fallen in many parts of Europe.
Green grasshopper
A long-legged green grasshopper stands on a pale wooden panel in a workshop, with spray cans on the shelf nearby. Its legs are made from green plastic and metal parts. Grasshoppers are a key food for birds and reptiles, so their decline affects whole food chains.
What the work says about waste
Bordalo’s animals do not lecture. They simply show, at a scale you cannot ignore, how much material we discard and how closely it is tied to the creatures we say we care about. Many of the parts in these sculptures, such as tyres, plastic crates and electrical casings, would otherwise have ended up in landfill or the environment.
His activism is not limited to sculpture. In 2023, before Pope Francis visited Lisbon, he laid a carpet of giant fake 500-euro notes at the site of the planned papal mass to protest the cost of the event, showing the same instinct to use visual shock to start a conversation. For readers, the simplest takeaway is the one the animals already carry: buy less that is designed to be thrown away, repair what you can, and dispose of the rest properly.
Sources: all artworks by Bordalo II (Instagram, Facebook); Wikipedia: Bordalo II; gallery originally compiled by True Activist.
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