 Welcome to Monday news number 46. Man, this sun is a bit annoying. Let's go into workspace. Welcome into workspace. It's not really a workspace yet. I wonder if it's even safe. I mean, look at this roof. It doesn't look very solid. Really okay. So yeah, this month I finally managed to go to Portugal. It was a bit of a hassle with corona. I actually had to drive through lockdown in France and drop by the workspace there as well. It's fun to see that. And yeah, I went to the trip with my mom and she dropped me off here and now I'm on the land. So some updates about the land itself. I mean it's big. A lot of stuff is overgrown as you see. So there's a lot of manual work to do. But I think in the beginning the first priorities would be more to focus on the basic infrastructure. So basically the goals are we want internet. To get internet we need electricity and to get electricity we need to get an address. And to get an address we need to wait for the municipality. And I've been warned this can take a while here in Portugal. So let's see. So in the Netherlands we had this big massive workspace with a lot of tools and materials inside. And in order for them to come to Portugal usually you would put it in a few shipping containers. But we figured we could also really use those shipping containers as a structure because when there's not much here that is even waterproof. So in one container together with Jason we made a kitchen, shower, washing machine sort of the basic utilities to live. We call it the town center. And the other one is the toolbox which contains all our best machines, tools, bolts, nuts, all these kind of things. And both are fully wired up. So if you plug them into the electricity and water you should be good to go. So it's a cool starting point. Before we ship them off we bake some pizzas in the kitchen just to test what's nice in the parking space. But yeah now they're in the Netherlands waiting to be shipped but we first need to clean the land a bit with some roads because they're pretty rough so they can't access. So basically just waiting for the municipality and the container. And meanwhile waiting we have an exciting thing coming up the 4th of December which is four days from now. It's called one army. Ooh an army! You might have seen or heard about it before. It was still a bit blurry and abstract always but it will all be clear in four days. So make sure to visit onearmy.ert when the time is there. It's going to have some changes like the Discord is going to change a bit, the YouTube, Patreon. But it's really... We've been working on this for a few years and it's really going to set up the good solid foundation for us to build upon in the coming years. Especially for the occasion I made a gun from chocolate. This will all make sense the 4th. So yeah make sure to watch the video and read the article on the 4th of December. Then something interesting I found on the web. It's from Guacamole Airplane, a San Francisco-based design studio. They already built a pressure plastic ejector and shredder machine before to play a bit with plastic but they realized well recycling isn't always the best answer. Sometimes you just need alternative solutions for that to avoid plastic in the first place. And so they started collecting a lot of these different materials and they set up this library of all the examples they found from seaweed packaging, cassava-based films, compostable film. So just a lot of different products that are already being sold right now and you can use but it's hard often to find them. And as you can see on the website it says heavily inspired by open source movements like pressure plastic. And I think that's also where you can really see it just makes sense to work together on these problems because it's so much work to find all these little things and the moment we sort of put them all together you make it much easier for anyone else in the future. So a really good example to go beyond recycling and think about what else can we do to work on this plastic problem. And then another very useful application it's called Will It Shred and originally developed by Andy as an excel sheet. Andy is an old-time member in our forums and recently turned into a web application by Kyle. But it's basically a tool that helps you to calculate which pressure plastic motor you need because this is often very confusing for people. A lot of numbers like the rounds per minute, the voltage, the wattage. So in this tool you can just fill in all the information you have on your motor and you can see if it's strong enough to shred. So you can play a little bit with the variables and at some point it says now it's not strong enough or now it is. So a very simple practical tool for a problem that everyone has. So link is in the description below. And then a cool kitchen from Norway from Press Plastic Utoplast. He basically made I think his own kitchen with hexagon tiles. You probably know them from Press Plastic. But he used them to cover up the walls because they're water resistant. And yeah, makes sense I guess. Honestly never really tested. But I think it's cool that more and more people try this because then we know if it works. So it feels like there are still so many applications more to find for Recycle Plastic. Now let's talk about containers. I found this picture which was already from half a year ago actually and just found it now from Mexico. It was set up by Cabo Adventures to start recycling there in the neighborhood. They built the container template we provided. They actually added another window in the middle which takes more work but we could highly recommend. It does make the space much more nicer and better airflow. So yeah, cool container. There's also some progress there from Press Plastic Mauritius who's also been setting up a container and here they've been moving it around in the harbor. And if you wonder where Mauritius is because I didn't know it's in the south of Africa very tiny island and apparently there's another foundation also setting up a container which is called Freedom Plastic. And they actually keep very nice track of older developments. So on their website I put the link below. You can see all the steps where they are. Currently they made the holes in there. They got the machines and now they're starting to install it. But it's kind of fun to follow I would say. This month we had a few very useful how-tos one from Soto Recycling in Germany. Which built an automated injector machine. So just like the industry does it basically where we have to do less. But they made it simpler. And they also really share all the blueprints, bill of materials, CAD models so you can do it yourself. They also uploaded a nice video that you can see it at work. So the machines open automatically. Plastic is injected and the product comes out. In this case they were making iPhone cases. But yeah they really provide properly all the documentation so you can have a look at it. Another one from Germany, Johan Plasto. Who last month you actually saw his lamps also in the monthly news. But this month he released a how-to on how he connects the parts together by welding. And this is actually quite an interesting technique because if you heat up plastic and melt so you can stick it together again. So he shows you step by step how to do that with a soldering iron. Kind of a very basic but very useful technique. And finally some updates from the fresh plastic team in France. About the sheet press. And they actually did one thing this month that made me very jealous. I always wanted to do that but I just never did. I was too lazy or too busy. I don't know. But it makes total sense to do. It's when you build yourself a new machine. It's still completely clean. It's fresh no plastic in there. So much potential. So they build a new big sheet press machine. And before they started making plastic they made a pizza in there. Which is such a big cool pizza. Yeah I would highly recommend to do that. Anyway here's a clip of them where they explain a bit the sheets they made this month and also the developments of the bigger sheet press. Hi I'm Michael and welcome back to the fresh plastic workspace here at Nantes. Over the last couple of weeks we've been in lockdown but that hasn't stopped us from pushing some of the development here in the workspace. In particular we've been focusing in on the sheet press and seeing kind of the potential that it has. So here is a solid 50 kilograms of polystyrene and we've pressed it into a 50 millimeter sheet. So this is the kind of plastic you see in CD cases and that kind of thing. We've also been experimenting with pressing thinner sheets as well. So for example this is a 1.5 millimeter sheet of polypropylene so you can see it's pretty flexible which is good for being able to bend it around a form or perhaps you want to veneer something with it. And you can also vacuum form plastic when it's when it's that thin as well so that that opens up a lot of other possibilities. We've also experimented with pressing certain waste streams as they come so a really common one is bottle caps that you get that are pretty difficult to sort sometimes. So in this case we just put the bottle caps into the press and press this sheet. So this is another thin one and this one is ABS so this one's been pressed from injection molding off cuts. So this is just some of the work that we've been doing to develop ways to utilize our sheet press system. If you'd like to know more make sure to regularly check our discord and how-to platforms. We've also developed a brand new sheet press system and Jason's going to tell you a little bit about that. I'm here with Michael and Jana, a local machine builders. We're putting the finishing touches on a new sheet press which is going to a group of pro-plasts who are based in Senegal who are producing tabletops for schools. It's one of the first pilot products for our new starter kits. The press has also been redesigned to produce 1.2 meter sheets which is the industry standard. This makes it easier for people to integrate recycled plastic into that build process without having to change it. It's also been redesigned to disassemble into smaller pieces to make it easier to transport. By the way we're also still looking for a new space to move our workspace to so if you know somewhere make sure to check the information document in the description. And if you'd like to support us with this kind of development one of the ways is through our Patreon platform so we'll put a link to that in the description as well. That's it from the precious plastic side. See you next month.