If you walk along edges of the Great Lakes, you're bound to find trash. It's a "Shore Thing." That's also the name of a new contest from the Alliance for the Great Lakes. The Chicago-based environmental group is kicking off spring beach cleanups throughout the lakes and their tributaries this month and offering prizes to volunteers who can make the best art from the trash they collect.

After the art is finished, photographed, and uploaded to the Alliance's Facebook page, it's properly disposed of --- like it should have been in the first place by careless beach-goers. 

There's plenty of material for would-be trash artists to work with. Last year as part of the alliance's annual Adopt-a-Beach event, 30,468 pounds of trash were collected and hauled away from 245 locations by 320 different cleanup groups. Volunteers in the program also monitor beaches and perform water quality testing. Last year, cigarette butts and caps and lids topped the list of collected debris.

By making the trash more visible -- as art -- alliance officials hope that beach-goers might be more thoughtful and dump less of it in the future. Trash clean-up on the Great Lakes is a year-round thing, unfortunately. There are 9,000 volunteers involved in the Adopt-a-Beach program in five states --- Illlinois, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, and Wisconsin.

The deadline for Great Lakes residents to build beach junk sculptures is May 21. Winners will be announced June 17. The "Shore Thing" rules are here, in .doc format.

Image: Trash sculpture on Padre Island by Larry Johnson via Flickr