 Welcome to our second monthly news update. For those not familiar with the format, it's going to be super rough, quick and unpolished. But we're trying to find a way to keep you guys updated without losing too much time on shooting video and editing. So if you're looking for a pretty video, skip this one and watch something else. Alright, this month started off doing a lot of experiments and tryouts with plastic as a material. Trying to push the boundaries and see what else is possible using different techniques or more handcraft. Trying to make more valuable stuff with it. Amatijs joined us to do a big research on plastic. Hello Amatijs. Hi. Could you tell us a bit about what you're doing? Yeah, I'm doing research about color blending and also translucency. So for instance I try to make hard lines with two colors. And this one. But it's pretty hard to make a straight, nice line with small flakes. About translucency I made those blocks. Those are made from CD boxes. And it sounds a bit like glass so you can also see through quite nice. Those are made mainly from the DVD or video boxes. Those are bit translucent but less than the CD box. This is made from shampoo bottles and also milk bottles. And this is not translucent at all. And for fun I also mold a lot of toys together. Yeah, it gives this nice party block with some nice details like a head of a toy still seeable. To the Playmobil guy? Yeah, I think a cheap one. That's about it. Alright, thank you very much. Then we'll see you next time. That's good. So this whole research and everything we learn we share open source online in our forums. And it's being updated regularly so check it out if you're interested. It might be a good inspiration if you work with plastic to see what else is possible with it. Now we also wanted a place where we can store all our best experiments. So the stuff we think of all things we try out is really valuable and worth exploring more. So we made our own precious plastic museum. It's basically just a corner in the workspace painted white with some nice shelf where we can highlight our most important experiments. But it's a good way for us to see value in that and try to focus on the important details. And in order to keep you guys updated digitally we also started the Instagram account called real precious plastic trying to show the beauty of plastic. So meanwhile we're doing a lot of experiments here in the workspace and I went together with Parley to the Maledives to see if we can do something about the plastic problem in the oceans there. And I don't want to talk about it too much because I shot some footage and the Maledives looked pretty good so it's probably better to have a look at that. Lesson one working with plastic always bring a round bottle. Hello. It's insane how much stuff there is around. So we're currently doing a beach cleanup. Here's all the stuff we collected now being sorted out. And it's as always a lot of it. So here's all the stuff we sorted out. A lot of bottles. And we're looking to see if we can implement precious plastic on one of these islands. So that's actually the pilot we're looking into. And the idea is if we can make it work there we can easily scale it to all these other little islands as well. Basically they all have plastic pollution floating in their beaches but they don't really know what to do with it. Besides looking at ways how to recycle plastic from the ocean we also had a lot of brainstorm session and chats and workshops on how to make sure plastic doesn't enter the ocean in the first place because there were many people from around the world sharing their knowledge which means we also had a lot of docs and skypes just to share all the information we have together to come up with a solution. And I really like the skype with this Santa Claus looking guy. He's actually one of the founders of Greenpeace and now running She Shepherd the boat that goes before boats that are illegally fishing on wheels and stuff like that. Super inspiring guy doing a lot of incredible stuff. And right that evening we also saw his documentary How to Change the World. It's basically how Greenpeace got started. It's interesting to see. Which brings me to the next point. I started a topic in our forum sharing all my top documentaries I've watched over the years. I would highly recommend watching them as well and if you have a good tip for me please leave a reply and I'll have a look at it. And back from the maladives I started working on new story hopper videos but these ones are a bit different. They're pretty tough, big and complex addressing more global systematic problems they're pretty difficult to make. The first one is called the dark side of data. Now I never ask you guys to share a story hopper video but once these are ready and out I would really appreciate it and the videos really need to be shared. So stay tuned for that. Now these are all the things we've done this month but also a lot of stuff happened in our online community. So here we have community news. So first off we have these coasters made in Thailand by Bope Shop. Hi everyone, I'm Tui Khachang from Chiang Mai Thailand. This is my studio. He's selling them as a souvenir to tourists but he's been pretty good in mastering the skill of coloring the plastic so he has all this super nice, spacey gradients and blends in here and they feel really sturdy. It's almost like a piece of marble. It's nice. Thanks for sending us. We got nine iron in the USA who made a hand-powered version of our shredder with a huge hopper. Looks interesting. Olympia and Curacao made a nice video about their whole project trying to create awareness and educate people around them so they can start recycling plastic more on the little island where they are. Have a look at this post in the forums below to understand their project a bit more. And then there's a project called Dirk from Belgium. It's an experimental workshop where they shred old products and turn it into something new on the spot. But they made this nice compact version of our shredder with a bucket underneath that shreds super tiny amounts. But I like the fact that if you shred something even a small amount of flakes is valuable and you can turn it into something new. And they also made a nice video about it which you can watch in the link below. And then we got a message in our online community from Ani0555 a member of the community that was visiting India in super remote areas and then he randomly stumbled upon an injection machine. He just saw it somewhere and he recognized it. So we asked around to build it and it was a few girls from a school there that built the machine. So he was like, why don't you share back a picture or something like that? But they were kind of shy and they weren't sure the machine was good enough. So he did a post in our community on behalf of them. And I think that's still what really amazes me that even though we not always got a picture back it's good to know that even in the most remote areas of the world people start recycling plastic. So don't be shy, just share your pictures. But either way, thank you for sending that post to us, Ani0555. So that's it for this month's updates. Thanks for watching. I hope to see you again next month. And thanks again for everyone that is supporting on Patreon. It really, without you guys, we wouldn't be able to do all of this. So thank you very much and we'll see you next month.