The Honolulu Museum of Art staked out absolutely the best location at the Hawaii Convention Center, right next to the escalators that connect the meeting rooms with the exhibition hall.

That’s where attendees to the IUCN World Conservation Congress, which concludes Saturday, can’t miss a pile of blue fish nets and scattered piles of plastic.

Get on the escalator going up, however, and you may see a design emerge: a woman swimming in the sea surrounded by honu, or turtles.

“The idea is here’s a beautiful woman swimming in the ocean, part of romantic Hawaii as a paradise, yet she is made out of plastic garbage, which is our day to day reality,” said Lesa Griffith.

The plastic, collected from Hawaii beaches by the nonprofit Sustainable Coastlines Hawaii, is part of an exhibit titled Plastic Fantastic, showing until Oct. 2 at the museum’s Spalding House.

As the exhibit explains, humans produce more than 300 million tons of plastic a year — 33.6 million tons of it discarded in the U.S. alone.

The exhibit is sponsored by Johnson Ohana Charitable Foundation, Kokua Hawaii Foundation and Hawaiian Electric.