rt critics may say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder but in the real world, beauty is in the eye of the pioneer - the visionary - who seems to see what the rest of us miss.

On the surface Heidi Leverty and the folks at Turtle Island Recycling appear to be worlds apart but in reality, they are quite similar: they both see a world of beauty in something as mundane as a mountain of recycled cans and clearly, the work they are doing today will have a lasting effect on generations to come.

Leverty is a Toronto artist and photographer. Turtle Island's cofounders - Ted Manziaris and Louis Anagnostakos - aren't artists but clearly, all three share the same view: recycling is a beautiful thing.

Leverty moved to Toronto in her early twenties and spent 36 years flying back and forth across the country as an Air Canada flight attendant. She married Tom in 1979 and the couple had two kids - Anna and Nicholas. By all accounts she lived a rather normal existence like any other working mom.

The artist didn't show up until she was in the final decade of her airline career, when she began taking photography courses at the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD). She never considered herself an artist growing up in Merano, Northern Italy even though she has an identical twin sister, Margit, who was a lifelong artist, photographer, and abstract painter who has been known to make art out of recycled egg cartons.

Even today she's not really sure where her artistic motivation comes from. Even the recycling pictures happened by chance when her husband, Tom, asked her to take some confidential documents to be shredded at Turtle Island's Cherry Street, Toronto Transfer Station in 2001.

She was immediately struck by the unexpected, sublime beauty of mundane objects in the process of being recycled, objects that ranged from a metal conveyor belt to pop cans and reams of bond paper, or bundles of flattened cardboard boxes which - when massed together - resembled Picasso-like sculptural abstractions.

Manziaris and Anagnostakos always considered themselves to be entrepreneurs but it wasn't until the early 1990s that they set out on the road of Toronto collecting garbage in a borrowed station wagon.

They saw their future with great clarity and became passionately convinced that they would one day make the word "landfill" obsolete.

To them, recycling has always been a beautiful thing and they're proud of their accomplishments:

"It's very rare you can wake up each morning and tell your kids their dad's going to work to change the world by finding new ways of doing something good. It's a great feeling," says Anagnostakos, who has a boy (12) and a daughter (15). Ted has two daughters, ages 14 and 10.

Anagnostakos recalls one of his earliest "eureka" moments came in 1990 when he noticed his telephone bill no longer arrived in a white envelope but in brown, recycled paper. Meanwhile, Ted was working in a real estate office and noticed that recycling companies were renting out an increasing amount of square footage around town.

"Ted called me up and said, 'You know there's something in this (recycling),'" says Anagnostakos. "The next week we're picking up recycled paper and scrap."

Their big break came one night in 1993 when, just before midnight, Maple Leaf Gardens' building manager, Bernard (Bernie) Fournier, called them. An event at the Gardens had caught the operations personnel off guard, and the hockey shrine was full of garbage after the spectators had left the building.

Ted and Louis worked through the night hauling a whopping 15,000 lbs of garbage from the Gardens in the company garbage truck at the time: a K-Car.

"From that day on Maple Leaf Gardens, and later Air Canada Centre, have been our customers."

Turtle Island has grown considerably in size and reputation since those early days. They now have offices across Canada and employ more than 450 people.

They weren't aware of Leverty's artistic reputation when she first approached them. Anagnostakos says he agreed because she seemed like a nice, polite lady and he didn't want to say no.

In fact, Leverty has had a number of showings at reputable art galleries and embassies. Her photographs were the subject of a 2006 show in Toulouse, France. As well, eminent Toronto interior designer Cecconi Simone has featured her photos in projects in Toronto, Chicago, and Washington D.C.

Since that time, both Leverty and the folks at Turtle Island seem to have affected each other in ways neither of them might have expected.

Leverty - upon viewing her developed pictures - was struck by the sheer volume of waste created by human consumption and has become profoundly aware of the variety and overwhelming quantity of discarded things.

She now sees the real-world beauty in recycling as well as the abstract view. As Anagnostakos puts it, all you need is to do the math:

"It takes 45 cans to make one pound. There are 1,200 pounds in one bale. That means one bale contains 54,000 cans. That's 54,000 cans that won't ever go to landfill as they did in years past."

Meanwhile, Leverty's own work also seems to have changed how Turtle Island's staff sees recycling.

He arrives at the Cherry Street facility most days before sunrise just as the white company trucks come rolling in. She dons a safety helmet and checks out bales of materials that appeal to her before finding an interesting subject.

"They're all incredibly generous to me. Now, they realize they're helping an artist and that's really different. They're looking for art. They're starting to see what I see and that's a big compliment to me, to be able to open someone else's eyes."

Turtle Island has spent the last 20 years opening peoples' eyes to the beauty of recycling and the company's destiny is quite clear:

"We're not going to stop until we don't have to use landfill anymore."

Will that ever happen?

"Absolutely."