JOPLIN, Mo. — At the start of his lunch hour on a wet Monday afternoon, Ben Mitchell began what has become a daily ritual, so long as the weather is nice.

Leaving his office at LaBarge Inc., he walked across the parking lot, past another business and then headed east along Junge Boulevard.

Mitchell’s eyes remained cast downward, scanning the ground in front of him.

“A lot of times, after a heavy rain, more things will wash up to find,” he said.

A few moments later, something catches his eye near the curb — a glimmer of orange among the green, rain-soaked blades of grass.

“They’re earplugs,” Mitchell said, as he bent to pick up the bright orange plugs strung together by a strand of blue wire. “These have a lot of potential for art.”

For more than a year, the quality assurance engineer has been collecting items found during his lunch-hour walks. The random bits of FOD — short for foreign object debris — that he and other walkers have collected had been stored in a box in his office.

A few months ago, he began to see if he could put the pieces together.

What has resulted is a series of sculptures created from items that people have either lost or thrown away. Look carefully at one of his colorful pieces and one will spot screws, bottlecaps, toys, old keys and pieces of scrap metal that Mitchell has turned into something new.

“I’ve been collecting things on my walks for about a year and a half,” he said. “It turned into kind of a joke here (at LaBarge). When I came back from my walk, I’d just lay whatever I had found out on my desk. People would come around and say, ‘What did you pick up today?’”

Mitchell varies the route he walks, trying not to cover the same territory too often. When football season is in full swing, he said the area around Junge Stadium is a virtual treasure trove.

As his collection began to grow, he was faced with the question of what he was going to do with it all.

“After a while, I decided I was going to make something out of it, recycle it,” he said. “I took the box home, cleaned it all up with soap and water and came up with some ideas of what to turn it into.”

Among his creations so far is a motorcycle — driven by a cat/action-figure hybrid — and a mobile strung with an oddball assortment of FOD.

Back at LaBarge, Mitchell put the earplugs in a box with other recent acquisitions, which included a pencil, a plastic pirate skull, a lighter and a piece of tubing from a broken snorkel.