 In this video, I'm going to show you how we took disposable masks like these and recycled them into useful and fun products. Using nothing but the masks themselves, we made a carabiner for clipping. This cube that's also a lamp. A hand plane for body surf. And a planter to decorate your home or office. So whether you're just curious about how we did it or you'd like to give it a go yourself, I'm going to show you the process and some of the decisions we made along the way. Before I show you how we did it, first I'm going to back up a bit and give you a sense of scale. Because honestly, I didn't know this myself. Now in 2021 right now, we're collectively throwing away about 30 billion masks every single month. And each one of those is made of a material which takes about 500 years to break down in the environment. Now if you think about it, that's like people throwing away masks at the end of the Middle Ages and are still finding bits of them lying around now. But what are they actually made out of? These masks may look like regular cloth or fabric at first glance, but their composition is really different. They're made up of three layers, each non-woven polypropylene. That's the same plastic you find in bottle lids and takeaway containers. They even melt like plastic. Good news is, polypropylene can be recycled using basic precious plastic machines. The instructions to belize yourself are available open source online as a free download. But we still have a couple of complications. This little strip here is definitely not plastic, and these bands are made out of material which happen to be a combination of nylon and spandex, so not polypropylene. If we want a pure material, we need to separate these. Sometimes you can do it either way, so we're going to try both. So the first thing we tried was taking the masks as they are and throwing them into the shredder. This gave us a really rough shred and it still had bits of metal and elastic inside, but it was perfect for our sheet press. This is our latest machine, and it can make big durable sheets to make stuff with. From here, it's up to you what you do with the sheet. You can almost work with it as if it was wood, so you can cut it with a regular saw, drill it, file it, you can even weld it. Using some of these processes, we made a lamp. The effect is really cool, you can even see the little bits of metal in the material. We also tried skipping the shredding, but when we did this, the bands didn't melt which caused all these weak points in the material, so shredding really does help. So the next thing we tried was separating out the bands and the metal strip. We then put this back through the shredder a couple of times and that gave us a really nice consistent material. This is really time consuming, but now we have a pure material which can easily be recycled again and again, and it's compatible with our other machines. The injection machine is super simple and it allows you to attach a mould on the end and squeeze plastic into it. So if you can think of a shape or product, chances are, you can make it. Even if it is out of these plastic face masks. Now we were also lucky enough to not have to deal with any viruses on our masks because we were sent a big box of factory rejects. So essentially these masks didn't make it to the end of the production line and they all have a couple of small problems or defects. But we still use the ones we can. This video really focused on these plastic masks, but the processes and principles are pretty much the same for many of the plastics we see every day. We were only able to recycle about 10kg of these masks in our own workspace, but if you'd like to help out, get involved, maybe recycling masks or even other plastic, head to preciousplastic.com to find out how. One more thing, if you'd also like to support us through the continuous development of our machines and applications just like this one, our Patreon page can be one of the best ways to do that. Either way, hope you enjoyed the video and see you in the next one.