Working in a really rubbish job

London – Furloughed from her job and confined to London by coronavirus lockdowns, Flora Blathwayt founded a business based on rubbish she retrieves from the muddy banks of the River Thames.

Just over a year, after she was struck by the colourful pieces of plastic she collected as part of a river clean-up, the 34 year old makes and sells thousands of greetings cards decorated with them each week.

When she moved to Peckham in southeast London, she sent a batch of plastic-decorated cards to nearby residents offering help if they were shielding from Covid-19.

“They were all the first washed-up cards,” she said. “Some of my neighbours were like ‘these are amazing, you should start selling them’,” she said.

She now works on the cards alongside a part-time job for a company selling packaging made from seaweed.

A geography graduate, she had no formal art training but enjoys being outside and finding new potential in old buttons or plastic straws while cleaning the river bank for a local environmental charity.