Prototyping interactive hardware artifacts is an iterative process that can produce significant amounts of waste. This problem becomes particularly apparent in teaching, when multiple students build the same artifact as an exercise and components can break when used improperly. In the context of a university course on tangible interaction, we explored how material found in the trash
could be used as a resource for prototyping interactive artifacts. We could source interesting components and found that a bottom-up prototyping approach based on those components opened up new design spaces. Furthermore, as we relied on trash as a resource, we
were able to considerably reduce waste during the course.