An art student turned trash into dresses for his thesis.

Joshua Asuncion went to his local landfill site and collected single-use plastic packaging from powdered milk, noodles, and candy wrappers, among other thrown-out items, in Ilocos Sur province, the Philippines.

He sorted them according to colour and cleaned them carefully with boiling water before being processed into beads to decorate the clothes.

Footage shows the fine arts major sanitising and moulding the cut pieces of plastic before sticking them into gowns and suits he designed himself. He spent five months from December 2022 to May 2023 doing cleanups to find suitable materials, handcrafting the beads, and sewing them into the clothes.

He said: ‘I call my work Eco Fashion, the metamorphosis of trash into class. Fashion and nature are two of my favourite things, so I came up with the idea of bridging the two. Since plastics take half a millennium to decompose, I decided to convert them into something beautiful.'

The student then held a fashion show where classmates modelled the clothes for the oral presentation of his study.