Cubes! Get yer garbage cubes here! Filled with 100% authentic New York City rubbish, freshly picked from the streets.

Advertisement

Sure, it sounds like a bizarre and unsanitary idea, but Justin Gignac, a New York-based artist and entrepreneur, has found a way to turn regular crapola into a lucrative side business.

According to Gignac's website, NYC Garbage launched in 2001 after a co-worker challenged the importance of package design.

The resourceful artist was convinced he could get people to buy something nobody wanted if he packaged it right. 

Related stories

The result: individual, smell-proof Lucite boxes, stuffed with some of the Big Apple's finest scrapings.

Advertisement

Each carefully-arranged package comes signed, numbered, and dated by the artist.

Gignac has sold over 1,300 NYC garbage cubes in 29 countries around the world so far (check out the map of garbage cube locations below). 

The cubes initially sold for $10, but Gignac raised the price to $25 when people started perceiving the containers as souvenirs from New York. When he raised the price to $50-$100, people began considering the square chests of trash as art.

Well, you know what they say — one man's trash is another man's...errr...expensive sculpture.

Advertisement

Gignac has also produced a number of pricier special edition cubes that include garbage from Obama's Inauguration and Opening Day at Yankee Stadium. 

What's next — bottled air from around the world? Oh, wait...

Click here to see the graffiti art of Banksy that has been vandalized >

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7o8HSoqWeq6Oeu7S1w56pZ5ufonyvxcJmnpqqkpa0pnnCrpmeq12Wv7V5ya6qraGeYrSqs82ammZqYGZ%2BboQ%3D