1. Students raise recycling awareness at Fairfield Earth Day celebration

2. Fairfield’s Earth Day celebration attracts hundreds of people every year. Environmental advocates like Boy Scout Troop 88 greeted the crowd at Saturday’s event as they entered the high school. The scouts were selling square foot gardens that they also offered to install for customers.

3. Other environmental groups and vendors were on hand to tell people about the latest sustainable gardening methods, clean air and water technologies and other environmental home improvements.

4. But what many people were waiting for was the “Trashy Fashion Show,” an annual event at Fairfield’s Earth Day celebration when local elementary and high school students model outfits they have created with material from their trash cans…

5. … like this dress, which a student created with bits of discarded film.

6. Lydia Tartamella led off Fairfield’s 2013 Trashy Fashion Show of more than 20 Fairfield Warde High School and Burr Elementary School students. The students have turned trash into fashion to raise awareness about recycling, and encourage people to reuse everyday items in creative ways.

7. “Shop, use and recycle” is a motto clearly followed by Tartamella, who created her dress from her Forever 21 shopping bags, as did her classmate, Kim Huynh.

8. Leah Hintz paired a skirt made from a garbage bag with a bodice of pink duct tape, decorated with a collection of Snapple bottle caps.

10. Mei-Ling Uliasz, a fourth grade teacher at Burr Elementary School (left), and Nancy Malafatopoulos, a sewing teacher and X of Fairfield’s Warde High School guided students in the trashy fashion project. They have partnered together on the show for the past seven years, and will bring the show back again next year for Earth Day.

11. Sarah Griffith designed her costume with several Great Vineyard shopping bags that her family had saved.

14. Burr elementary school student Caroline showed off her outfit created from ribbon, newspaper and other items she found around the house. Caroline designed the outfit as a project for Uliasz’s Roots and Shoots environmental club at Burr, along with other students from the second, third, fourth and fifth grades.

15. Carter, another Roots & Shoots club member, collected newspaper, brown paper and garbage bags to reproduce his dad’s work attire.

16. Ashley Augiero’s love of coffee inspired this dress.

17. She created her bodice with plastic coffee bags, and trimmed it with bottle caps…

18. … with a mermaid skirt she created from numerous coffee filters she folded in half.

19. The fashionistas take their bows.