If you’re going to make something, you’ll probably need some materials. For most designers, it’s a case of sourcing from a bona fide supplier. Need some wood? Head to the lumber yard. Insane amounts of stone? Go straight for a quarry. But materials aren’t cheap, especially in this age of austerity.

It makes sense then, that a better way of sourcing raw materials might be to salvage what we already have around us. Ariane Prin, a recent design graduate from the RCA in London, did just this for her graduate project, entitled From Here For Here. She built a device that makes pencils using waste material that had been locally sourced. So locally, in fact, that it came from the college’s own skips, rubbish bins and waste units.

‘When you design,’ says Prin, ‘you have to think about the material you’re going to use. And unfortunately we’re running out of that material.’ Determined to not use new wood for the pencils, she spent days scouring the college’s buildings in search for useable alternatives. The result was a cocktail of substances from different departments of the college, including dust from the wood work shop and flour from the kitchens. Together the ingredients were mixed into a malleable clay-like pulp, small amounts of which were in turn mechanically compacted and shaped around pieces of lead, creating a set of new pencils.

It’s not just urban environments that provide a place to scavenge. London designers Alexander Groves, Kieren Jones and Azusa Murakami banded together last year for The Sea Chair project, which explores the potential for sourcing washed-up waste – specifically small-sized pellets known as ‘nurdles – from the surface of polluted seas. As part of the project, they built a hand-operated mobile device that can be used to separate out small pieces of plastic waste. The Nurdler, as it’s called, works using a hand pump that takes in the polluted sea water and a flotation tank that then separates out the different densities of materials.

But the scooping up of this plastic soup is only half the story; the designers are already proposing a larger-scale solution that involves converting an old fishing trawler into a chair factory that uses the plastic waste as a raw material. Should they win the Victorinox Time To Care award and receive full funding, coasts around Britain could soon be inhabited by many of these ingenuous beach scavengers.