It's hard to say no to free raw materials. As a design student, you are perhaps even more inclined than regular students to pick up streetside milk crates, old refrigerators and the like and haul them back to your dorm to repurpose into a usable piece of furniture. When Miri Breskin, Adi Shpigel and Keren Tomer were ID students at Israel's Shenkar College of Engineering and Design, they took that a step further:

...they began keeping tabs on apartments that were being renovated, so that they could use the construction waste in their class assignments. What bothered them most of all was the question of where all the white plastic jalousie blinds - trisim - one of the most notorious components of apartment balconies in Greater Tel Aviv, disappeared to.

"We started tracing the path of discarded construction material," relates Tomer. "We discovered that the renovators weren't willing to give us the shutters and would only sell them to us, because they sell the aluminum frames. From the renovators we moved on to scrap metal shops, where we saw how they mishandled the poor plastic shutters, kicked them and broke them. We asked one of the scrap-shop owners for the shutters and because he had to pay for waste removal, he agreed to let us take as much as we wanted. We came, loaded up, and that's how we found new raw material to work with."

The trio has since opened up their own ID studio, Kulla Design, and have used trisim to create their own furniture line consisting of a chair, stool, CD rack, and room divider, seen above.

So. Is there anything useful that you see people throwing away en masse?

via haaretz