 Hey, my name is Joseph, and welcome to monthly news number 51. This is where we recap what's been happening around One Army, our global community of people and projects working to tackle environmental issues. We had a ton happen this month, so let's dive right into it. First up is Precious Plastic, which is an open source project all about working on the plastic waste issue around the world. This month, myself and our team member, Nate, we headed to Hawaii to do an onsite collaboration project with Parley for the Oceans, which is like an ocean advocacy group that does a lot of educational awareness surrounding humans' impact on the oceans. The goal of the project was to try to turn ocean plastic washing up in the shores into new products, and especially we wanted to make bricks from this. Our project was part of an exhibition at a cultural museum that was all about the wonders of the ocean and humans' impact on it. We set up some shipping containers with an education zone and then a small precious plastic workspace where we were working on making the bricks. Plastic waste is really just one part of the story surrounding humans' impact on the oceans. Actually, I would recommend you check out the documentary called Sea Spear Sea on Netflix, which goes pretty deep into these issues. Here's a little clip to get you started. I've been fascinated with the ocean for as long as I can remember, but this romantic vision that I've always had of the ocean completely changed a story of just how huge our impact on the seas had become. We are at war with the oceans and if we win this war, we're going to lose it all because mankind is not able to live on this planet with the Dead Sea. They talk a lot in the film about the industrial fishing industries' impact on the oceans. One of the things I took away from this film was about the great Pacific garbage patch. You know that huge area in the ocean bigger than the state of Texas full of plastic soup? Well, it turns out that over 46% of the material in there is from industrial fishing nets and rope. Luckily, most of this material is made up of polypropylene and high density polyethylene, and that means we can process it in our precious plastic machines. If you want to see more of our videos about plastic recycling, hit the subscribe button below. OK, let's cut back to Hawaii and Nate is going to walk you through the process that we had going on there. Step one of the process is collecting all of our ocean waste, which parlay from the oceans is collected. We sort it out into color and into plastic type. If we don't know what plastic type it is, we've been using this pastel machine by Matteo as a little scanner and tells us what plastic type it is. It's been really useful. We designed this washing system to clean up the ocean plastic. It's really dirty and sandy. It's got oils and other bits and bobs on it. So we bring it over into this tank. It has a pressure washer, which sprays and kind of blasts the plastic, fills up, and kind of has a little centrifuge action happening that kind of gets all the grit and material off for the most part. Once it's kind of full and kind of through its washing cycle, we pump the water down through a sand filter to kind of catch a lot of the micro plastic that get beaten off by the pressure washer, and it goes up back into this reserve tank. And then the reserve tank then refeeds the pressure washer. Step three of the process, once we have washed our plastic, we'll put it in one of these bags and hang it up on a rack and let it drip dry. And once it's dry, then we can start shredding. Final step of the process, we come over to the extruder, pour our shredded ocean plastic in, run it through just like any other process. We've been running the plastic into our brick molds. Comes out with something sort of like that. The process takes about two to three minutes. It varies depending on the plastic type and what flow it is and the speed of your motor, all that nonsense. But it'll be roughly around two to five minutes. Yeah. And our precious plastic workspace, as you can see, we still have a lot of putting things together to do. But it's coming together. OK, that's it for the project in Hawaii. Now let's talk a little bit about some how-tos that showed up on the community platform this month. First up, we had one from DevLab that's all about making a compression mold to make recycled plastic sheets. So especially if you're just starting at home, this could be a great method for you. Next up, we had one from Plastmakers come in. And shout out to you guys because you're great at documenting and making videos about what you do. And this one specifically is about a mini-press that they designed. And it's something that you can build yourself using this or you can buy it from them on the precious plastic bazaar. And lastly, I can't talk about the how-tos without mentioning this one. We had one come in from Basic Shit. And it's called a squat stool that is supposed to help your digestion and your posture while you're going to the bathroom. So I haven't tried it, but I'm pretty curious. OK, now let's talk about fixing fashion, which is a new project that we released this month. We're super excited about it. It's been in the works for over two years, so it feels really, really good to have it out finally. Fixing fashion is all about caring, repairing, and upgrading your clothes so you don't have to throw them away and buy new ones. It's kind of like a fashion brand, but really like the exact opposite because we're not trying to sell you anything. In fact, we want you to just keep your clothes as long as possible. There's been a lot of awareness around the waste generated from the fast fashion industry, and this project is targeted directly at it. It was really great and interesting to watch this project develop over time. It started in the beginning when we were developing precious plastic version 4. We had a small special ops group that was working on fashion waste. In the beginning, they were melting synthetic clothes, seeing can we recycle this, can we melt it. But then it really started turning into the repairing and caring of clothes. And it was cool to see because most of our team would just stop by their table and start fixing our clothes as they started getting worn out. So this system of patchwork and different repairs almost became like a unofficial uniform for the team. Really, really cool to see. It'd be great if you guys could help us push this project out over the next few months. Definitely watch the release video if you haven't seen it yet. Link in the description below. Follow us on Instagram at Fixing Fashion Community. And of course, share your fixes and hashtag them Fixing Fashion. Okay, last but not least, Project Camp. We had two huge videos come out this month. First one about turning a van into a living space. So the idea is when you first buy a piece of land, there's not a lot of living infrastructure. And a van is kind of an easy way to kind of just go there and get started. So the video kind of shows you step by step how to refurbish your van. And the second video is about outfitting two shipping containers. And it's kind of for the next step after you have your first living space on your land. The first container is what we call the town center, which is sort of the home base. So it has a shower, it has a kitchen, it has a little office space. And the second container is our workspace. And that has a wood working area and a metal working area. And that's gonna enable us to really build out the future infrastructure for Project Camp. We've also released a separate channel that specifically focuses on weekly updates for Project Camp. So definitely check that out if you haven't yet. It's great to see what's going on there on a week by week basis. And lastly, if you haven't seen it yet, we have a Patreon. There's a lot of really interesting active conversations going on there. We use it as kind of a sounding board for different things we're doing. So if you haven't yet, we'd love to see you supporting our Patreon. Okay, that's it for the monthly news. We will see you next month.