 Welcome to Monthly News number 31. So this past month we've been hard at work doing more machine testing, and also product design development. But we also started the documentation process of the new machines, which takes a lot of time and effort to make sure that everything is properly documented. We also had a lot of newcomers this month. That's so fucking close. All right. What? Just my name? Hugh. Vliqueria. Tom. Anna. Radiumna. Louise. Greg. Anna. Flo. Speaking of newcomers, we've almost reached the limit of the amount of people we can house here, but we're still looking for two more people, one video editor and one new coder. But Benji and Pitch can talk more about that. Thank you, Philippe. So we are both coders working here in Eindhoven on the One Army community platform to make the world a better place. We are doing good, but for the next two months, we will appreciate the help of a backend developer that's already worked on mid-to-high-scale projects. Yeah. We are working with technologies such as React.js, Firebase, Node microservices, and we would like to implement some automated testing and more generally make our codebase stronger and long-lasting. We could work remotely, but we would prefer to have someone coming here in Eindhoven headquarters. If you are interested, go to next.preciousplastic.com. Thank you, Benji and Pitch. Now over to Dave, who will talk more about an upcoming problem, money. So we have a little bit of a problem coming up. We're running out of money. See last year we got €300,000 to develop pressure plastic version 4 and we've been doing that over here in this big space and we will get it done. Don't worry, budget is there, reserved, properly done. However, after that, we got nothing. All money is gone in here, which is a lot of money spent in one year, but it's not that we spend it all on stupid things. I mean, we work with volunteers that don't get anything paid. We use second-hand place and cutlery and we sit on old couches. We made our own showers with some plastic fused bags. Probably the most fancy thing in here is Rory's bike. And we live in this neighborhood that's going to be demolished soon, so we all live very simple and temporary. Some people like it more basic and some live a bit more chaotic. And I've been living in my van on a parking place for the last year. And we eat food in bulk, which is way more efficient. But actually, most of the money goes here into workspace. Okay, cool. So here is an overview of the precious plastic version for a budget. As you can see, the biggest component is the workspace. So this is all the research and development that we do for new products and machines. And that makes up about 40% of our total budget. And we've spent over 80,000 euros in this area so far. So that's all the metal, all the wood. And we need tools to do all that development work that we're doing for version 4. The next category is the kitchen, which makes up about 20% of our budget. And it's 2,700 euros per month, which might seem like a lot. But if you think about it, we're feeding 40 people here three meals a day. And that works out to only 70 euros per month per person. And if you compare that to what a normal person would spend in the Netherlands, up to 300 euros, it's really quite cheap. And we can do that because we buy in bulk. And I really think that demonstrates the benefit of sharing. We really are able to eat cheap because we do share those costs. Another big expense that we have is the housing. So we paid like 15,000 euros for a whole year to have 10 houses, which seems like a lot, but really that works out to 30 euros per person per month, which is only 6% of what someone would pay if they were just living here in the Netherlands normally. And one other fun stat that I thought would be cool to talk about is the amount that people normally get paid in the Netherlands, which is around 2,300 euros. If we were to pay everyone 40 people for one year, that would cost us over a million euros to do that. So we really are benefiting from the fact that we have people here working every day, just volunteering their time because they believe in precious plastic, version 4. That's really been a huge help for us. So once we release version 4, the whole 300,000 euro is gone. It's all in development. We don't have any new awards or grants or a plan to move forward. And we're not very good in this and finding funding because we're also a bit picky to know where our money comes from. But there's this one sort of income we really like and it's called Patreon. It's this platform online where everyone can support a little bit of amount of money, but all together you sort of push a project forward. Which fits perfect for us because you can really stay focused on your goal, but also stay independent without having to deal with investors or advertisements. So if you're not a supporter on Patreon yet, it would be great if you could do that. Even for a small amount of money like a euro would already mean the world to us because that's going to be the tool for us to really make sure we can move forward. Maybe not with 40 people like here, but at least establish a core team of 5 people that can really make sure we can give you guys better support, better community updates, more videos, all this kind of stuff. So make sure to support on Patreon. Okay, speaking of Patreon, we are starting this new thing for our Patreon supporters that we call the Mountain News Rackle. Each month we will give away an item from one of our projects. This month we will give away a bowl and a soap holder from Zelenu. To pick a winner we needed to be entirely unbiased and so we turned to our robot arm, one arm, to select a winner. We uploaded the newest AI algorithms. We shall select the winner. So the winner of this Mountain News Rackle is Nicholas Jacob and he will win these super nice bowl and soap holder from Zelenu. We will contact you and next month we will give away this tool from Stilllife. And now over to Kat for Community News. Hello, ladies and gentlemen and welcome to episode 30 of our Community News. So I hope that for most of you guys it's not a secret anymore that working with discarded plastic offers a huge variety of opportunities. And one of the most fascinating aspects in my opinion at least is playing with all these colors plastic comes in. The Project Klaage Factory from Chile, they seem to really embrace this property of plastic. They work with colors, transparencies and light and create these sheets with spectacular patterns which look a bit like microscope images of bacteria or fruits or other natural stuff. I don't know about you but I never get tired of seeing morphosets and cool sides of plastic like that. Then we have another precious plastic on board project and I think it's really about time to share those little activists Sydney and Indy from the Sea Monkey Project. Living and traveling on a boat between Australia and Indonesia they decided to do something about all the plastic floating around them on their way. So they built the precious plastic machines in a very nice and playful three-in-one combo on a table and with that they've been traveling around spreading the message doing workshops and helping to set up local recycling places. And their mum does super fun educational illustrations about it. I think it's just really cool to see so much being driven by such young people in such an energetic and fun way. So thumbs up! Okay so number three and last but definitely not least for this month is Trash Board made a precious plastic skateboard for us. It's super cool out of recycled bottle caps and it's super nice and solid so thanks a lot guys and other than turning plastic waste into fresh skateboards like this the exciting thing about them is that they let the people make their own designs so you can go on their website draw your skateboard and they will create it for you. And I think that's a really powerful thing to involve the people in that process because it's creating a more personal item which then hopefully makes the owner value and love it and keep it even longer just like we love our precious plastic board. Thank you guys! Okay so that was it for this video thank you for watching don't forget to support us on Patreon comment down below if you have any questions and see you in the next Mountain News!