The following article explores the notion of visual garbage and considers various strategies for its recycling, upcycling, and use. Visual garbage is investigated in the context of media sphere development and the theory of garbage itself. The authors propose to analyse such approaches of visual garbage use, as visual camouflage and glitch art, as well as to examine the principles of visual garbage recycling in terms of the Aristotelian conception of causality. Understanding garbage as a medium helps not only to uncover the features of its circulation, but also to consider garbage as a source of knowledge accumulation. Moreover, it helps to find new social, political and aesthetic strategies for understanding contemporaneity, which in turn allows us to draw conclusions about the untapped potential of visual garbage. Visual garbage not only becomes a source of visual pollution, but also contains a resource for reality conversion. In order to determine the criteria for visual pollution, it is necessary to examine the performative productivity of garbage and its effect as a mediating tool.