 Hello everyone, welcome to Monday News number 42. So this month we finally bought a piece of land. Yeah! So we're on our way to Portugal to buy some land, goodbye ain't over. Hello bus. So first stop is Paris and I figured this might be the only time in my life that I see this little boy without any tourists around because there's really just no one here. All right, so that was the day in Paris and now we're taking the night bus to Bordeaux. 45 minutes. So that was Bordeaux, now we're taking the bus to Lisbon. And this is actually a very good way to travel within Europe. So during the day you spend your time in the city, you explore, you walk around, eat some interesting things, do some work on your laptop and in the night you go into the bus and you sleep. So you slowly move towards your destination. And this saves a lot of emissions compared to flying but it also gives a much richer experience because you see much more of your journey. So I would highly recommend to do this in Europe, hashtag slow travel. Now before we're going to the land we're going to eat at an illegal Chinese restaurant. It's hidden in the center. It's in the middle of a lot of apartments where people are living but they converted it into a restaurant. So you're sort of eating in their living room. All right, so that was a good meal, now go to the land. So it's super warm and I didn't bring my tripod because it was too heavy so I'm just going to do this laying down here on the sun to talk about the land. But first let me show you actually all the good things about the land. We camped out a few days here to explore the region and the land has a little creek with water. There's a big area for agriculture. There's an old ruin perfect for a kitchen and it has a view on the future growing to cook which is cool. Well it's still a bit dry the land so we got to fix that. There was a massive forest fire three years ago and most things burned down but slowly nature takes over. There's also another old ruin burned down during the fire and now taken over by the bushes. It's hidden there. I mean there's some work to do but perfect start for a workspace you only need some imagination. And there's a big rock on the land. They say there's a treasure underneath. Either way it gives a great view. So yeah this is basically the entire land. So yeah it's super cool land has a lot of potential and it's still a bit rough here and there. It was 100 000 euro and it's nine hectares big so it's pretty big and also quite a chunk of money. So thanks for all the friends and family for borrowing all the money because we really had to scrape it all together. We'll make a more in-depth video about this whole process later. But yeah we really see this thing as a long-term strategy that we don't have to pay rent or housing for the team so it might be quite a chunk of money upfront but in the long term it would be cheaper. Especially living in Portugal is much cheaper than being in the Netherlands so it's really to make sure the project can continue in the long run. But yeah we're definitely not really there yet. I mean this is just a piece of land. We need to think about our workspace, our infrastructure, electricity, water. There's still a lot to figure out and things to purchase. So yeah if you ever wanted to support the project on Patreon become a patron. This might be a good time to do it because in the coming months we're going to have quite some big expenses. But also we would share updates there so you can see more in-depth what's going on, follow the process or request things if you want us to do or film or make something. Anyway that's it for now, we just have the land. I'll go back to the Netherlands to prepare myself to move and finish this monthly news. Hello, I hope you had a good plastic free July at least from the consumption point of view. Anyway let's get to the community news. Okay so let's start with a long-over dimension of Boute from precious plastic Philippines who probably has been one of the most active people since we started the Discord at least. And he's been sharing all of his activities and experiences which is a lot of machine building of all sorts of machines but also plastic experiments and plastic products, collection, washing, events and all sorts of things. And all of this is shared on Discord so that makes it very motivating for us as well as everyone there to just follow up and learn a lot. Alright, next is new how-tos. So here we've got a useful guide how to make blueprints which is crucial to make your solution open source and enable others to replicate it or modify it. So cool. And precious plastic Lancester shared their how-to including the 3D files to make their cool note touch tool so you can avoid touching public surfaces. And Plastocay combined a solar concentrator with a simple construction to inject plastic only using the energy of the sun to melt the plastic. So that makes the whole setup completely electricity-free and can be located anywhere as long as there is sun available. And this one is a quite simple and manual process but it shows that there is a lot of potential to use solar energy to make the use of the machines more independent, cheaper and better for the environment. Big thanks for sharing and really hoping to see more like that. Okay, Instagram. As always we've also been sharing some cool community creations on our Instagram like these spacey lamps from Chris doing this who uses a very interesting technique which is plastic blowing. It's like glass blowing but with plastic. And we're hoping to get a how-to for this soon but you can already see a lot about the process in the videos and photos he shared. Sticking to the Instagram topic, last but not least, we had a very exciting collaboration with Weekly Design Challenge on Instagram who introduced precious plastic to their audience and called for designers to come up with ideas for products made with the injection machine, plastic sheets and extruded beams. And the outcomes and reactions were amazing. They've got an overwhelming amount of entries including lots of good ideas and super nice renderings of products which could be made from this precious material. So for anyone looking for more inspiration, what you could make from the injection machine sheets or beams, check out their Instagram and the hashtags WDC. I will put them here. I don't know them right now. Yeah, so check out the hashtags and their Instagram and get it back. Lots more in the pipeline but I think I've got to stop talking now otherwise it gets too long. Yeah, so let's continue with our plastic-free consumption and plastic-full recycling. And as always, take care of yourself and others and your environment. Thank you very much.