HA Schult and Elke Koska walk through an installation in Germany.
Photograph by Thomas Hoepker

In Trash People, German artist HA Schult offers commentary on constant human consumption. Fifty life-sized figures, sculpted of trash collected at a municipal dump in Cologne, line the courtyard of National Geographic's headquarters. Schult's army of trash figures have traveled to some of the world's best-known landmarks as part of a series of projects called "Archaeology of the Present." Installations at the Pyramids at Giza, Red Square in Moscow, and the Great Wall of China served to raise awareness of the volume of garbage left by humans and the world's resulting ecological imbalance. After this stop in Washington, D.C., the Trash People are scheduled to appear in New York City and Antarctica.