 Hi, my name is Jusia and last month I went to the big russians plastic workspace sale. Now I'm the owner of this very useful monthly news site. Welcome to Monthly News 40. So last month I was here in the exact same place in a full workspace. Welcome to Monthly News 39 and then we spent the entire month to clean it all up because we got kicked out of our workspace. And this is a big space. So we had a lot of things in here. We put everything for sale and let people pick it up. Okay children it's time to do that thing. Make the classroom look tidy and clean. Everybody must work as a team. Arriba! Pick up the pens, put them in the pots. Don't forget the lips, we put them back on. Although I won't try it, but we cannot draw those wonderful wonderful pictures. Shake, shake it stop, shake it take it drop. Shake, shake it stop, don't do a belly flop. It was a bit tricky with borders closed due to corona, but we managed. Our leftover wood, welding tables, machines, some random precious plastic stuff, including the precious objects we sold are now often new owners and galleries around the world. I'm not sure if we did it all corona proof, but we had to leave in one month. More about that actually in the previous Monthly News if you don't know why. Overall there was a very improvised month trying to pull it off with a very small team. So yeah now it's all done. We have an empty workspace. Feels weird seeing this place fully cleaned up. And we actually are workspace less now so we don't have a workspace. And we sold most of our things and gave a lot away. And a special thanks to everyone in the community for actually coming to help out to buy the things. But also really picking it up, getting the sheets, getting the prototypes, getting our shredded plastic. And people on Patreon for upgrading their pledge to help us out financially. It feels really good having this community behind the project that helps out in moments like this. And I want to give a special mention to David Ohauta. He's been a Patreon supporter since the very early days. He was actually our top supporter so he contributed, donated the most money. But he stopped supporting on Patreon, no worries we get that. I just want to say thank you for all the years that you've been supporting this project. Really cool. All right so now some more news. So we actually didn't really do that much because it's cleaning up this entire space. So yeah not that much news. But we did notice a lot of you guys had questions on Facebook, YouTube, Discord, this kind of stuff. So this month we're actually going to do a Q&A. All right so let's answer some questions. Next we'll be asking the questions. Hey Kat. How are you guys doing after the move and everything? Hope all is good. We're tired but it's going okay. How does it feel now that the space is empty and all the plastic stuff gone? It feels very weird. We had a lot of stuff in here and now it's fully empty so it's just weird. What happened with one arm? One army is coming. Wait for it. It's coming. What happened with one arm? You mean the robot? We sold one arm, the robot. Will the developmental side of precious plastic still continue? The what? The developmental side. Yes. Where's the new headquarters? Have some plastic to deliver. We don't have a headquarters but look on the map to see where you can bring it locally. What is the worst most evil plastic out there? I don't know. There are many different types of plastic. A few are rough ones to work with. I would say the very niche ones that are so little amount made that it's almost hard to even find the properties for it or what to do with it. What are your top methods of identifying plastic if they don't have a resin ID code? There are many different ones. I would say check the video. But by now I can sort of recognize it a little bit by working so long with plastic. Have you tried to see and see the plastic sheets? If yes, what was the result? Do we make a outing on that? No, not yet. Yes, we have some interesting results. Still need to make a how-to on that coming soon. When will PayPal be back on the bazaar? It's easier than credit card. I'm afraid PayPal is not coming back. We wish but apparently it's quite difficult to set up all over the world to have it properly regulated so I don't think any time soon. I need the blueprints of your machine's help. All right, go to our discord. Tag Plastic Hub and he can show you where the blueprints are. For the products you make with plastics, do they need to be very clean? Because sometimes they might be filled with some snacks or stuff like that. I would say it's always better to clean them because they might get stink and rot. But it's also safer and more hygienic and you can control the properties of the plastic better. So I would say you don't need to clean it, but I would highly recommend. I've built a working version of every machine but never managed to any real success with PET plastic bottles. Have you? Nope, I hear you. Have you guys ever thought of making a vacuum foiling your machine? No, we thought about using it for our sheet press because there are already a lot of vacuum machines out there. But a few people are making a how-to about that so hopefully it's coming soon. Can I get a link to any sort of discord Facebook group or anything for precious plastic? Yes. Are you planning to make smaller, solar and human powered machines to make the project more accessible? It's a topic that often comes across from people around the world asking for it. We never really dive into it or I think wouldn't dive into it anytime soon. But there are a lot of community members working on this. So I would say have a look on our discord and how tos to find some more information. Do you have a portable extruded machine design? Depends how much you can carry. Do you think there would be a demand for a large scale 3D printer in the precious plastic community? Yes, highly requested. Are there any other pilot projects like you did in Kenya and Patagonia planned in upcoming months or years? We had a few cool projects in the pipeline, however a lot of it got cancelled due to corona. I would also say if you follow on Patreon you can get some more insights on this information because Mathia wrote a few nice posts about it. But yeah, for now it's completely blank canvas, nothing there is planned. How does problem the precious plastic team have tried to tackle without success? P.E.T. Is recycled plastic products easy to sell? Sometimes, sometimes not. Depends also how good they look. What happened to the Rotomold project? I made a Rotation Molding Machine in version 1 but I didn't really see that much potential in it because you're always limited to the size of the oven. So we kind of skipped that one. What's your thought on precious plastic currency? It's cool. Complex to make, but it's cool. How many people are you right now? I really don't know what the team is right now. We have people everywhere all over the world, some having involved, some little. I don't know what our team is. Oh no, that sounds so sad. In a good way. Are there going to be more opportunities for people from around the world to join the team in Eindhoven or anywhere else? Yeah, so Eindhoven doesn't exist anymore. So at the moment we don't really plan any new big version, but if version 5 would be coming, yes, you can definitely come. Would you ever consider becoming a large-scale recycling company? Ideally we are a large-scale recycling company because everyone does a little bit around the world. Version 4 just released. How would you like to see it mature and stabilize? What kind of things do you hope it will achieve? I hope we can really make sure the machines don't have any bugs anymore. They're really consistently running all the time and people can actually recycle on a daily basis and make money out of it. So yeah, just building more of those machines and workspaces and making sure they all can sustain themselves. What is the main goal Precious Plastic wants to achieve in 2020? Staying alive. Yeah, maybe just making sure we become a bit more stable. In the last year we've been always moving workspaces around, having different people in the team and I think it's really time to make sure we know this is our team, this is our workspace so we don't lose time in these things like moving around. So becoming a bit more stable. What are the best ways to contribute to the precious plastic ecosystem during the current pandemic? I would say in ways just business as usual in terms of we still need to recycle plastic, we still create waste so just contribute to the infrastructure already set up. And if you're talking more specifically like if you cannot go out or you cannot access your machines, I would say help coding the community platform is a big one to help with or making sure to share the project around to make sure that people actually know it exists and if information is available. What happened with the Edible Plates project? It's online, you can already see it, but we would leave a more proper video explaining why we did that whole project. Do you know projects of upcycling clothes? No, but that is coming. Yeah, good question. Is there a potential public launch date for one army? And what else can we do to help it? No public date yet. We planned a lot in the last months, everything got postponed, cancelled, whatever, so we don't plan anymore. We'll see. It's coming. And what else can we do to help it? Wait for it to be ready. What's your favorite chocolate? Chocolate. Okay, do you prefer chocolate bars or chocolate ice cream? Mmm, it's a rough question. Would you like more, your mom or your dad? I don't answer this. How is project cum coming along? Uh, delayed, but coming. Now that you don't have a fixed space, are you moving to Portugal? Yes, that's the plan. And although we don't really have a fixed space, we do have something else, but let me show you. Okay, so originally we had this big workspace and there's still some stuff we need to ship, but for the rest it's all empty and we had a lot of stuff, basically. So we bought two shipping containers. One is right here and one on the backside of it. And they are going to be our town center, basically, for project cum. So this is fully equipped with a workspace, all the tools we need. And in here we have our utilities like washing machine, shower, kitchen. So they're going to help us to set up project cum. But we'll talk more about that later on. All right, so for now, Kat, it's time to record the community news. All right, welcome to another community news. First of all, I want to thank again all the people from the community who offered their help with storing things, moving stuff, who bought stuff and picked it up here. Yeah, because we are really happy that we could make sure all the materials we have here are in use because it would have been too much to take with us. So thank you for that. We also had a little plastic sheets remaining from all our tests. So instead of selling them, we thought it would be a good opportunity for the people from the community to test it and try out some more things. So we made packages and gave them away for people who applied to make a how-to or some sort of documentation and tests. Yeah, they got picked up here. And now we are looking forward to see some more techniques coming up and more how-tos. Talking about how-tos, in the meantime, we've got three new how-tos on the community platform. Two months ago, we had an interview with the people from Wasteless in Arugam Bay who established a kind of plastic collection system in Sri Lanka. And now they made a how-to where they share their process and the tips and tricks of what they learned throughout the time. So that's a very important topic because collection is challenging and just very crucial for every recycling project. Michael Makes, who is also part of our V4 team, took the quarantine time to document his stool top he made with a plaster mold for the extrusion machine. And that's a great low-tech mold-making technique, especially if you want to prototype the mold before you invest into a more expensive metal mold. So check it out. And then Sheep on Wheels made a how-to for interchangeable patterns for your injection machine, sorry, for your injection mold, which saves you costs and materials because you only have the injection mold and you can just swap the pattern part. It's also nice to see that people are starting to make small events again after the whole COVID silence. So if you also have an event, don't forget to put it on our event page on the community platform because that way we can share it more easily and eventually more precious plastic people can actually find it. And in case you haven't seen it already, we also introduced the Funding Friday on Instagram because we wanted to create some space to support precious plastic people who are looking for crowdfunding to start their project. So every Friday, if you tag us on your posts and stories, we share it and hope that this will help a lot of people to kick off their project. So keep your eyes open and support if you can. Okay, that's it for this month. Yeah, keep on sharing. We will catch up and see you next month.