Hong Kong fashion designer Tiger Chung goes to great lengths to source materials.

To show just how far, Chung plays a video taken earlier this year at a waste collection point near the designer’s flat in Hong Kong’s Tseung Kwan O district.

The footage shows Chung, scissors in hand, stripping leather from a discarded couch until all that remains is a wooden frame. Parts of the video are dark and grainy. It was taken at midnight, after all.

“I went to the waste site when it was dark because I didn’t want people to see me,” Chung says. “I would feel embarrassed and worry that people would laugh.”

But it is Chung who is having the last laugh after scooping first prize this month in the annual Redress Design Award, the world’s leading sustainable fashion design competition.