> We received a €100K donation. Which was amazing, but we decided to give it all to the community so they can continue developing their projects. Not to sustain the organisation itself.
It seems a lot of the problems they described are self-inflicted and go a step beyond simple mistakes or errors in judgment.
To be honest, I think the request for extra support would be more sincere if the leadership involved in those situations also stepped down and, instead of promising a 'version 5', looked at solving the problems in the org itself.
The due diligence just doesn't check out and there is zero indication that the organisation has learned from these problems and not merely acknowledged them. How would you know it's not a scam?
I can't shake the feeling that this a dream that was pursued by people who (at least for a time) didn't need the income, and not technology that was under any pressure to actually work. Something like a lifestyle business, but in this case, maybe a lifestyle charity.
The article is full of "community" this and "local people" that, and very low on details. The little that is there raises red flags. For example: The fact that their rented machine shop had to close down is given as an explanation for them having to sell all their machines below cost and then not having the money to buy the machines back when they found a new place. That doesn't add up: temporary storage spaces exist and aren't even expensive, given that you can choose a remote location. It seems like a crucial detail was left out, maybe one that would paint them in a bad light.
I gather that they sell (apparently unsafe?) wood chippers, presses and some injection moulds, probably at cost. I don't understand what else is there. The "version 4" release thing mentioned in the article might be their open-source "academy" [1, 2] that's supposed to teach you how to start your local recycling shop. It includes valuable tips like "add all your expenses" and "don't forget to include taxes" and comes complete with an empty Excel sheet -- I'm sorry, a "Business Calculator". No commits since 2020, so the "version 5" of this guide that they claim to have been working on for five years must be hosted somewhere on a private GitHub fork instead. I'm sure it's awesome. Best of luck.
Moving a machine shop is not easy. A decent knee mill is about 2000 lbs. Disassembly is possible but you need a hoist or crane of some sort. Then you have to lift that into a vehicle like a pickup truck, trailer or box/flat bed truck. Then repeat the process at the storage location, then all again to move it to the new location. It seems the people involved did not want to or have the ability to tackle this. Paying a rigger is possible but the cost is very high.
I'll just assume they sold below cost to get people to bring their own equipment to take the machinery away at zero cost to them.
Even assuming good intent, that was extremely silly from them to donate their money away when they don't have anything to begin with. This either assumes that the community is wiser at doing their work (doesn't sound to be the case), or that they were betting that it'll work out one way or another (most likely through another donation) – not realizing that such a donation is exactly what guarantees their organization's future.
They ARE "the community" that should be turning that money into actually useful things. Non-profits should not donate money. They should spend it or allocate it as grants.
I think that a charity that just funnels money to other charities is very suspicious and needs to be really on top of its stuff to not just seem like an enterprise for skimming money off other people's goodwill.
I would imagine a condition of the funding would be to restructure and get the right people in place to continue the mission, ideally more responsibly.
Like, the entire article is saying "we fucked up in various ways" but there is no accountability piece to speak of. Just an ask for more money for a ground up rebuild.
I'm reminded of a clip of Mark Cuban talking about his biggest WTF?'s from Shark Tank. One business owner made a product for $15 cost, and sold it for $30, but they were burning cash.
Mark's story is that he asked the owner about it and noticed she was offering free shipping "to make the customer happy". Cost of shipping was, of course, $16.
Call me cynical, but I see organizations as being right-wing simply by existing as organizations in the sense that somebody in in charge, they induce a hierarchy, etc. As an organization gets larger, more established and more "sustainable" you see increasingly that the purpose of a system is what it does. [1]
One problem I've been thinking of is how community organizations can stay in touch with people online without centralized social media. The backdrop is here [2] and a good example of an anti-social media local organization is [3].
I'd trust a rag-tag group of web developers working on their own account to have a good chance of doing a good job of building out and promoting this kind of platform. If you could just pay people without having an organization or fundraising, $500k would go a long way. If a big non-profit, say the United Way, gave it a try, it would value groupthink more than competence and I think would struggle to develop an effective team and the budget would stretch into the $5-50M range. It would certainly spend more on overhead than it would on action. Worse yet, a group like that might solicit grants, but grants would go to people who are good at getting grants, not good at making web sites, so you might as well piss the money away.
"Sustainable" is the word non-profits use for "profitable" and if there is a big risk in non-profits it is that they are every bit if not more niggardly than billionaires yet without the profit motive you can't approach management and say "we can improve our process efficiency by 5% and pocket the improvement" (radical when repeated) or "here's a new venture that could expand our market by 30%"
I don't understand his situation completely, and I can also understand that making this into a real business (profit or not) is necessary to make it sustainable, but I can also see the fear of creating a monster [4].
From what I've seen of the Precious Plastic project and its offshoots over the years (mostly from afar, though), I think would find quite a few people asking similar questions and having intense discussions about such subjects there. ;-)
I’ll call you cynical and say your entire first paragraph about organisations being right wing is total and utter tripe. And the rest of your diatribe doesn’t improve on it.
I don’t really want to follow through the rest of your thesis.
This is the first time I’m hearing about “Precious Plastic”, so my comment is entirely based on this one article.
The real problem here is that they are lacking a clear and well articulated roadmap.
If we give them money, what will they use it for? Will they make new opensource tool designs which has bigger capacity? Easier to maintain? Or smaller and easier to manufacture? Or safer by design? Or lower energy? Or easier to transport? Will they use it to develop forum and wiki software? Will they throw all the donations into a litigation pit? Will they use it to microfund workshops all over the world? Are they planning to do more outreach? If so where and how?
I’m not looking for a detailed step by step project plan. But something directional would be great. What will “version 5” give to the world compared to “version 4”?
If they can’t answer that then Precious Plastic is indeed in trouble. But the trouble is not from any of those mentioned stresses, but from a lack of vision and direction.
I've seen this play out more than once during my career and startups with otherwise great concepts end up treading water because the founding team or leadership fails to execute.
Being a charismatic sales person might work wonders in terms of attracting funding and talent but it's not enough if you lack the capability to follow through with it. I'd wager that lots of the latest batch of startups that want do-it-all 'product engineers' will collapse for the exact same reason: delegating vision.
It's always been my job to Make Things Happen, as opposed to "Make Things Look Like They're Happening."
A lot of "Making Things Happen" is boring and un-sexy, but absolutely crucial.
I'm always surprised, when I run into folks that are awesome at schmoozing and getting folks to come to the party (I'm not so good at that stuff), and may be extremely creative and talented, but lack the follow-through, to make their dreams a reality.
It's usually when folks like that, team up with folks like me, that magic happens. Rarely, you have it in one person.
PP has been around for over a decade and has successfully built a pretty global community as a non profit. Here's an attempt to map out that community:
Precious plastic has been around for a long time and has a pretty global community behind it. One of their big goals is to create a network of microfactories around the world (basically maker spaces). You can see a map of relevant and existing nodes here:
This is an ambulancing project. The focus should be on forcing industry to pay for the pollution they create on an industrial scale. It's never going to be cleaned up by small actors. These projects probably make plastic production more acceptable which is not what we want. Look over there, see recycling a few tones of plastic works, now let's carry on producing boat loads of shit.
I agree, there are people working on "molecular barcoding" [0], which would allow for perfect separation of packaging. Combine this with some standards for easy de-lamination or something to get the different components detached (7 layers of different materials in a foil appear to be quite standard) and separated and you should make a dent in the problem.
However I heard "from the system" that manufacturers are not interested in the world knowing exactly what they produce, why, where it ends up and what their contribution to our plastic soup is (surprise surprise). It's a sick system of you ask me. The law (so us citizens) should set the incentives.
Still, people making nice things from waste is always good. But I would be a bit worried about the fumes and dusts coming from these materials though. Where I worked we didn't laser-cut poly-carbonate for example because it would produce airborne endocrine disrupting substances...
Health concerns are important - which is why the PP knowledgebase and PP workshops include quite a few infos about the safety aspects of different plastics and how to work with them.
The laser cutter is not necessarily a good comparison for safety considerations. By definition, a laser cutter burns the materials it cuts. With equipment that melts plastic - like injection molding machines or FDM 3D printers - burning the material just means that you did it wrong, your temperature was too high - and you will not get a useful product.
What people do on their own is another matter - but hey, that's apparently just human (see all the chainsaw heroes in safety flip flops, the people running SLA printers in their dorm room, all the soldering that goes on without a fan/filtration, ...)
Also, I think the use of plastics and it's impact on the environment is probably overstated from a consumer standpoint- no one really thinks about the systemic issues and the cause and effect cycles at work. Everyone is concerned with micro plastics now, but taking drink bottles and making them into chairs is just a distraction.
We have a lot of knowledge on how to literally burn plastic and not pollute anything- waste really doesn't have to be an issue.
The micro plastics that studies find in the human body are probably from sources no one cares to address- acrylic paint, tires, polyester clothing, things that are constantly being ground into nano particle size bits that are omni-present in all environments (and no one even considers getting rid of).
If you live in a first world country the ocean plastic isn't from you- if you drink from a plastic straw or not it probably doesn't matter. That plastic is most likely from fishing nets and from a few countries where people throw their waste directly into a few rivers.
People would rather focus on shaming those who don't sort their trash and drink from plastic straws.
I largely agree with what you say but I have my doubts about the following statement.
> If you live in a first world country the ocean plastic isn't from you
I live in Ireland and I’m not sure that’s the case for us. Plastic was collected in the recycling bins and then shipped to China for processing. I was always skeptical of the environmental soundness of shipping plastic to the other side of the planet – and the lack of transparency about what happens to the plastic waste after. I always wondered if any plastic that wasn’t PET was just dumped in a river or the sea. A few years ago, China stopped accepting plastic refuse from Western countries so the plastic was sent to other Southeast Asian countries but they also find it to be not economically viable to process. I looked into this issue before but found it hard to get solid evidence that the plastic is actually recycled. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of the plastic that is collected in the West for “recyling” ends up in the ocean, while we in the west pat ourselves on the back for doing the “right thing”.
Personally, I do my best to Reduce and Reuse rather than Recycle.
> Passing responsibility to producers as polluters is not only a matter of environmental policy but also the most effective means of achieving higher environmental standards in product design
We basically need to increase the cost of plastic to account for all externalities.
It's a super material, it needs to cost as much as competing natural materials: nylon - silk, whatever plastic bottles are made of - glass/aluminum, whatever packaging is made of - paper/textiles, whatever containers are made of - wood/steel/aluminum/etc. Similar story for paints.
Basically, excises, but for plastic instead of just alcohol and tobacco.
We do this, plastic starts being used just where it really makes sense.
We need to increase the cost of everything to account for all externalities. This will also encourage people to invent things to reduce the cost of the externalities, win win
I'll raise an alternative: plastics are degraded by the heat and pressure of repeated processes like injection molding. Recycled plastic objects will be of lower quality and shed more microplastics. Instead of recycling them, incinerate them for electrical energy. Use a modern incinerator design that guarantees 100% mineralization to carbon dioxide and water.
I looked in to this because it does actually sound logical, but it seems like burying plastic in landfill might actually be better. By incinerating it, you've taken carbon (oil) out of the ground, and released it into the atmosphere. By burying it back underground you are locking it away for at least a thousand years.
We need to cut down on producing it first, recycle it second, and then bury it as deep as possible.
In general landfilling (in modern, properly designed landfills) should be regarded as a kind of carbon sequestration. It's actually pretty hard to be better for the environment than that.
Historically burning trash has been a net win because food scraps decompose to methane if landfilled and if used to generate electricity and/or local heat networks the trash displaced fossil fuels from the grid.
If your nation is diverting enough organic waste from household waste, and has enough low carbon generation in the grid mix then the calculus changes and you can start worrying about the fossil plastic in the mix, but the biggest impact there is to intercept the plastic early and recycle it.
> We need to cut down on producing it first, recycle it second, and then bury it as deep as possible.
You mean 're-use' rather than 'recycle'?
It has always been 'reduce, reuse, recycle' but what bemuses me is how this is nigh on impossible for normal people, even those that do their recycling and say the right things about caring for the planet.
Being serious about it means an end to having a consumerist lifestyle. This can be difficult when kids are involved. Mountains of plastic are just there with kids, in everything they do. You can't take your child out of society to live as if it was two centuries ago, their friends and the parents of their friends will have this abundance of plastic, whether it is LEGO bricks or food containers. It is just unavoidable. Capitalism as we know it would collapse if we got serious about plastic.
I am quite serious about plastic, albeit by accident. On a whim I went 'whole food, plant based', which means no processed foods or animal products. One unintended consequence is that my recycling and rubbish shrunk to a fraction of what it used to be. I no longer have plastic trays, plastic bottles and what not, just a few plastic bags, a few tins, a few glass jars and a modest amount of paper.
If I am lucky enough to get a good plastic container, I really will upcycle it.
If I meet up with relatives that live the middle class life, then, vegetable peelings aside, they will create more waste in a weekend than I will create in approximately four months.
I enjoy not having the cognitive dissonance that goes on with buying single use plastic containers whilst knowing that nothing really gets recycled. I am also 'beginner level' when it comes to the art of being 'zero waste', there are those that create no more than a small jar full of plastic in a year.
My relatives genuinely believe they are doing their bit by putting lots of plastic in the recycling, and they would frown upon someone that did not follow their example. They live in a very different consumerist world to me. But, if everyone lived like me, there would not be a lot of the economy left!
People are deeply wedded to their single use plastics. Realistically, cutting down on plastic means an end to the plastic foods that most people enjoy eating, whether that be ready meals, take outs, animal products, produce from far-flung parts of the world and sugary beverages.
A century ago, nobody had anything plastic. Given our consumerist ways, you wonder how people lived back then, when most domestic waste consisted of ash from fireplaces.
A ban on single use plastics is what we need, not any Band Aid recycling solutions. You never see LEGO bricks or anything valuable in the plastic recycling stream, all of it is single use plastics. But a ban on single use plastics would mean people paying for a lot of glass, steel and waxed paper. This comes with problems of its own.
Imagine you are driving a truck load of yoghurts from Italy, over the Alps, through France and to the UK so that middle class people can buy them. If those yoghurts have to be in glass jars then the diesel bill for this important middle class delivery will rise considerably, due to the extra weight of the glass. More CO2 would be emitted getting these vital yoghurts from industrial unit to toilet bowl.
Not buying the yoghurts is not an option as the mind-numbingly boring job of driving the truck hundreds of miles is considered gainful employment. Therefore, 'reduce' is not really an option, so that means 'recycle' or landfill. Anecdotally, as in my instance, 'reduce' is definitely possible and definitely the way to go, but, given how most people live, it is a total non-starter, mostly because it would require dietary changes.
A better alternative is de-polymerization, turning the plastic into monomers (or at least oligopolymers). This way, 90% of it can be recycled without degradation.
There would be serious logistical issues with this. Drive by the nearest refinery and see the cracking tower. Essentially this is doing as you describe, making ethylene, propylene etc from olefins. But these refineries are located at pretty centralized petroleum or gas terminals. Compared to the mass flow of used plastics distributed evenly across the population density. You either need the haul the stuff very long distances or build lots of huge refineries everywhere. An incinerator is a significantly smaller capital investment than a refinery.
There are several candidate processes for restoring plastics into virgin materials. If we had an overabundance of very cheap renewable energy (like the excesses during daily peak solar production which are just characteristic of lots of solar) you can just tear the carbon into pieces by getting it extremely hot under high pressure to essentially create new crude oil and start from scratch. In the current world there are some promising enzymes that can tear apart polymers to return plastic to an earlier stage in production which makes it more or less fully recyclable without degradation, but these things are still under development.
I was super excited about Precious Plastic when I discovered them 8 years ago. But it didn't take long to realize that they didn't have a clue.
The machines are all FAR too small and fancy/expensive to really make much sense. I've seen some more practical offshoots from PP that design larger machines with recycled materials etc, and consequently they have sustainable businesses around the world.
So, most of all, as is clear from the post, they never really even tried - in over a decade - to make it a viable, self-sustaining enterprise, of any sort.
Also, what's conspicuously missing from the post is their Portugal-based Precious Plastic Camp boondoggle, which always struck me as a hipster commune more than anything.
They also suddenly deleted the original forums, which contained lots of fantastic info.
So, I don't have much faith that throwing more good money after bad would help at all. I'm grateful for the inspiration and excitement that they brought into the world, but it's time for them to be recycled.
And, yet, I expect they'll con someone into helping revive them for version 5, 6 and beyond. That's the way of the non-profit world.
I think it is a shame that such a negative comment is at the top.
In fact, I am ashamed by association. Their burn rate is low (~$30,000/year now, though likely higher before) and the value they generate for everyone else has clearly been very high, even just in intangibles. They sound like a public good, and you hang them out to dry for not being... a profitable corporation? Is there an alternate universe where you toss libraries under the bus as well, when they fail to pay their way like bookstores? (I'm curious if anyone has feelings, why or why not this is a reasonable comparison for me to make.)
You (and those voting/speaking to your worldview) are likely materially collapsing something from existing through creating a narrative here. Which is meaningful because this community is likely one that could step up -- with a deep understanding of open source, and wealth through tech associations and profits.
Is your take worth that? Sink or swim, creators and gift-givers? Is PP universally bad enough that you wish for that to be your contribution here?
If you'll re-read my comment, you'll see that the lack of financial sustainability was only one of many significant criticisms.
The strongest is simply that the machines/educational materials they produce are simply not practical, useful, or accessible. It's, as many other comments have said, performative.
Conversely, there's plenty of great and little-known organizations around the world who HAVE built productive, sustainable organizations around small-scale recycling - by designing their own devices.
Moreover, as many other comments have pointed out, there's never been any accountability (again, not just in a financial sense. Though, the figures are also quite murky, such that you're citing numbers that are far too low). There's no plan other than "give us more money and THEN we'll put in some effort to come up with and share a new plan". These are not serious people.
Theyre seemingly decent and nice enough, but do not merit further support - let alone celebration. There's plenty of others in the world who are far more deserving of help, but don't have the cool marketing platform that PP does.
They seem at best perforative in their efforts as the original comment points out. Surely there is a middle ground where one can concede a company is poorly run and unprofitable, and that those two things often tie together
Libraries are funded by the tax payer and as such have no expectation to make money - they simply operate within the budget they are given.
A charity or a non-profit organisation is funded by donors. Non-profit doesn't mean 'loss making', it means that all of the money is re-invested in the organisation to support it as a going concern, rather than paying it all out to shareholders or, in the case of PP, re-donating it to their community.
So it's perfectly reasonable to want such an organisation to be, well, financially sound. That way it can continue to make the impact it does, or even increase that impact through growth.
If that doesn't happen then you haven't donated to support a sustainable mission, you simply funded a one-off project. In any other situation this would be seen as catastrophic mismanagement and there'd be some accountability for it.
I’ve also followed PP from the initial grant in Paris but a lot of these problems seem to be self-inflicted. Ones that most stood out were having no insurance, unrealistic open source expectations and giving $100k away rather than furthering the cause.
I’m sure theres minutiae and context i’m missing but that post doesn’t scream competence.
I’m worried any donation would be fluttered away.
The line about being at peace with the project dying seems bizarre. Perhaps time for a little organisational shakeup
> The line about being at peace with the project dying seems bizarre
Perhaps it's just me but this was the line that made the most sense to me. If a non-profit thinks they've achieved their mission, or at least that they don't have a good plan for next steps, then the most sensible thing to do is to close shop rather than to spend money unnecessarily.
Hindsight is always 10/10. They might have tried something new, and most of founders learn by making experiences and mistakes. I don't see an issue here
As I see it, the fundamental issue is that they're trying to create some kind of hand-made artisanal solution to a problem that is already being addressed on a vast scale by industry. My plastic waste is collected at the kerbside and has been for over a decade. It's baled up and sent off to a facility with huge automated sorting machines. Why would I take my plastic waste to a workshop when the local government already collect it from my doorstep?
Precious Plastic have designed various DIY plastic processing machines for what is essentially hobby use. That's fine, whatever, but for about the same cost I can just buy a commercially-made machine. A manual injection molding machine or a benchtop filament extruder is just a thing you can buy on AliExpress. If you wanted to set up a half-serious plastics business, you could buy an old Boy or Arburg injection molding machine on eBay for close to scrap value. If you want to feed that machine on recycled plastic, reprocessed pellets and regrind are a cheap commodity product.
The problems that remain in plastic recycling are mainly really complex engineering and material science problems, because re-melting inevitably degrades the quality of polymers. Those issues are being slowly chipped away at by serious researchers in academia and industry.
I don't doubt their sincerity, but feel-good aspirations rarely solve much of anything.
I can't speak for your locale, but in the US, most "plastic recycling" is a myth, as very little of it is truly reusable. Trash companies basically resell what they collect, and if they can't, it ends up in the same landfills as the trash bin contents.
A lot of comments here seem to assume that the goal of PP is to provide a complete solution for the plastic waste problem. It's not and it doesn't have to be. I may be off base a bit but I think the amount of plastic that is actually being recycled is only around 10% on average (with substantial spikes in both directions if you look at it on a country basis). So there is more than enough headroom to do something useful with the stuff that would otherwise have been burned or buried.
I kind of sort of agree with your points about the manual machines but Aliexpress was not as prevalent as it it is now 10 years ago and it's not as if there were already lots of open source blueprints for injection molders, extrusion machines and the like (unlike for example in the 3D printing space), so the knowledge built up and shared by PP is still useful.
I guess it's also a pretty human thing to want to tinker with making your own machines and share them (if not, there also would not be a bajillion static site generators, notes apps and whatnot in the software world).
I don't really agree about your points about the industrial injection molding machines, though. Sure, if you want to produce many of the same parts, that's ultimately the way to go. However, if you want to do small-series stuff, experiment with different ways of making molds, do educational hands-on stuff and so on - which is what PP is much more about than maximizing output - a manual machine is much more appropriate.
Anecdote: I regularly had people from (university) departments who have all sorts of professional injection moulding equipment use our - in comparison ridiculously primitive - setups. Because it was much easier, much faster and the "vibe" in a Precious Plastics lab is usually also very different than in a research lab (and that's also not to be underestimated if it's more about development/experiments/learning than about maximizing output).
Also: Fucking around with old hydraulics can be a rather dangerous activity and requires some safety considerations not relevant in manual machines.
"Con" is a strong word, and I'm not sure appropriate.
If someone was taking a $500k salary from donated funds, I'd feel it's a con. I see nothing to that effect.
People without a clue sometimes pick up a clue after some time. Donors donate for a variety of reasons. There are angel investors who donate simply because they want to push a concept along, or want to help nice people.
If someone wealthy decides to support them instead of e.g. buying a supercar or a $10M painting, I think it's all good.
you're right, 'con' was far too strong and unfair of a word.
They seem like decent enough people, but completely incapable of running a project like this. Which is what a significant portion of the non-profit world is made up of.
I don't think its all good though if someone donates to keep it alive - there's many FAR more worthy organizations to give money to, be it for plastic or any other cause. And, quite often, those that receive large amounts of funds are far better at marketing (or, worse, playing "the game"), than actually operating
That's a bit of a cynical take in my opinion.
For a community focused initiative, I'd say they deserve a bit more slack in terms of expectations of professionality, scale and sustainability. They now leave it up to the community to decide to pursue that or abandon altogether. Fair thing to do I'd say.
Why are community and competence mutually exclusive? Also, again, the main criticism was that the machines are simply not useful, practical or accessible - especially for those who live in areas that most need recycling initiatives. Rather than design larger, more effective machines from recycled materials (eg make shredder blades from leaf springs), it's all specialized alloys, laser cutting, etc.
As for the forum, its been a while since I've looked at any of their stuff. But I am quite certain that there was a period where the forum had disappeared. Someone even managed to copy/fork the forum. I can't find it right now though. I'll share it if I find it.
What sets PP apart from companies making similar machines is their commitment to open source hardware. They make some machines themselves and sell them but their main focus has always been the open source blueprints that (in theory) any one can use to make these machines at home
Lots of cross over with Open Source Ecology's Global Village Construction kit[0] where they attempted to create open source versions of 50 technologies they considered critical for civilization. They made a brick press and a tractor but I think progress slowed after that
"The machines are all FAR too small" They've given you the design, you can easily scale it larger.
"expensive" then move on.
"they never really even tried" they tried more than you. They built it, and release the plans. Mission accomplished. If you even bothered reading their post where they say once the project is complete, they walk away for a while.
"hipster commune" and what is wrong with that?
"deleted the original forums" perhaps there was a reason?
"it's time for them to be recycled" it's time for you to be recycled
"they'll con" thems are fighting words and you should expect a lawsuit
"That's the way of the non-profit world" I doubt you've even given but I'm sure you've taken. take your money to your grave
Someone donated 100k to them recently and they apparently gave it all to their community and didn’t use it to save their own org, so now they’re broke and dying.
Even cash won’t save you if you don’t know how to budget and plan.
their work to date seems like 100K well spent on trying something very few other people would even attempt, no less take it as far as they did.
i'm not sure if people here comprehend how much work it is to do and sustain something like this for almost a decade. a lot of the work is niche community-building, it's a hard slog fought one workshop at a time. its like herding idealistic cats, not easy. i will always appreciate those who hold the line and choose to die on weird hills like this.
while i commend them on their work to date, it's clear that this is a hard problem to solve within our current socio-economic environment. after all, plastic is around us, within us, and inevitably part of us now. as humans we need to stop burying it and confront what we are doing.
This. No matter your stance on economic base model or plastic and recycling in general the decade-long effort of Previous Plastic is very commendable, was a lot of hard work and produced quite a bit of actual output. That doesn't warrant the amount of negativity in this thread, IMO.
It’s a lot harder to be an effective person than a well meaning one. I knew some people who tried to get an intentional community together and it was three or for professionally successful people and a lot of people who could burn up a meeting with talk but not much else.
> We received a €100K donation. Which was amazing, but we decided to give it all to the community so they can continue developing their projects. Not to sustain the organisation itself.
And I see no mention that they have any plans to not do it again
Until there's a reasonably priced industrial scale process to efficiently reprocess plastics into indistinguishable-from-virgin plastic precursors, I think all plastic waste and similar garbage should be burned in well maintained waste-to-power plants and eliminating this source of semi-fossil-fuel energy should only be considered a priority when all other fossil fuel power sources have been effectively eliminated.
We're already burning things for power, might as well have that crude oil take a detour into consumer products for a while first, and because it's useful in several ways, make it last in line to eliminate (and at the same time offsetting some oil/coal/gas production)
However, due to the price of the shredder and the tools required to transform the plastic into new forms; One needs to have a dedicated space with a lot of power. Then you need to secure a source of plastic. You would think this part would be easy, I mean that is the whole premise of this org's existence, right? You would be wrong in that assumption. There is big money in "recycling" in the US. From the collection, sorting, and distribution of recycled materials... someone already has a contract to legally "do it."
I am bummed to see them in this position. There seems to be a few hotspots around the world where this would really work. They aren't near me, that is for sure.
15KW to make a single sheet of plastic. That is practically the entire capacity of a residential power feed.
And “several sheets per day”. Ouch.
If I were seeing a plastic recycling facility on How It’s Made I would expect to see a continuous feed system, with elaborate heat scavenging systems to preheat the ingredients while cooling the product.
I’m not sure how you scale such a thing down to cottage industry scale. Preheating to around 60° could be reasonably done by amateurs but this stuff goes up to at least 350° to melt plastic.
Working with those temps probably not appropriate for an office environment, but on a porch or well-ventilated garage, should economically outperform 110V pretty well.
Interesting. I have used Precious Plastic and similar machines in educational settings and I know a few people who have set up more or less permanent workshops. There were never any problems getting materials (one's own trash, old plastic furniture and other plastic things from classified ads, have participants bring their own materials, ...).
Could you elaborate on how the machines are expensive? Did you want to buy or build them?
Would it be possible to do something on a much smaller scale? In addition to workspaces they also have community drop off points. With some concerted effort and education you could likely get a few communities to commit to such a project and bring their cleaned and sorted plastics
Readit News
It seems a lot of the problems they described are self-inflicted and go a step beyond simple mistakes or errors in judgment.
To be honest, I think the request for extra support would be more sincere if the leadership involved in those situations also stepped down and, instead of promising a 'version 5', looked at solving the problems in the org itself.
The due diligence just doesn't check out and there is zero indication that the organisation has learned from these problems and not merely acknowledged them. How would you know it's not a scam?
The article is full of "community" this and "local people" that, and very low on details. The little that is there raises red flags. For example: The fact that their rented machine shop had to close down is given as an explanation for them having to sell all their machines below cost and then not having the money to buy the machines back when they found a new place. That doesn't add up: temporary storage spaces exist and aren't even expensive, given that you can choose a remote location. It seems like a crucial detail was left out, maybe one that would paint them in a bad light.
I gather that they sell (apparently unsafe?) wood chippers, presses and some injection moulds, probably at cost. I don't understand what else is there. The "version 4" release thing mentioned in the article might be their open-source "academy" [1, 2] that's supposed to teach you how to start your local recycling shop. It includes valuable tips like "add all your expenses" and "don't forget to include taxes" and comes complete with an empty Excel sheet -- I'm sorry, a "Business Calculator". No commits since 2020, so the "version 5" of this guide that they claim to have been working on for five years must be hosted somewhere on a private GitHub fork instead. I'm sure it's awesome. Best of luck.
[1] https://community.preciousplastic.com/academy/business/works...
[2] https://github.com/ONEARMY/precious-plastic-kit
I'll just assume they sold below cost to get people to bring their own equipment to take the machinery away at zero cost to them.
I think that a charity that just funnels money to other charities is very suspicious and needs to be really on top of its stuff to not just seem like an enterprise for skimming money off other people's goodwill.
Like, the entire article is saying "we fucked up in various ways" but there is no accountability piece to speak of. Just an ask for more money for a ground up rebuild.
Mark's story is that he asked the owner about it and noticed she was offering free shipping "to make the customer happy". Cost of shipping was, of course, $16.
One problem I've been thinking of is how community organizations can stay in touch with people online without centralized social media. The backdrop is here [2] and a good example of an anti-social media local organization is [3].
I'd trust a rag-tag group of web developers working on their own account to have a good chance of doing a good job of building out and promoting this kind of platform. If you could just pay people without having an organization or fundraising, $500k would go a long way. If a big non-profit, say the United Way, gave it a try, it would value groupthink more than competence and I think would struggle to develop an effective team and the budget would stretch into the $5-50M range. It would certainly spend more on overhead than it would on action. Worse yet, a group like that might solicit grants, but grants would go to people who are good at getting grants, not good at making web sites, so you might as well piss the money away.
"Sustainable" is the word non-profits use for "profitable" and if there is a big risk in non-profits it is that they are every bit if not more niggardly than billionaires yet without the profit motive you can't approach management and say "we can improve our process efficiency by 5% and pocket the improvement" (radical when repeated) or "here's a new venture that could expand our market by 30%"
I don't understand his situation completely, and I can also understand that making this into a real business (profit or not) is necessary to make it sustainable, but I can also see the fear of creating a monster [4].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Join_or_Die
[3] https://fingerlakesrunners.org/
[4] Oxfam, Bill Gates, and company will do anything for Africa except help them develop a real economy that the state can tax and provide services
https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
Deleted Comment
I don’t really want to follow through the rest of your thesis.
The real problem here is that they are lacking a clear and well articulated roadmap.
If we give them money, what will they use it for? Will they make new opensource tool designs which has bigger capacity? Easier to maintain? Or smaller and easier to manufacture? Or safer by design? Or lower energy? Or easier to transport? Will they use it to develop forum and wiki software? Will they throw all the donations into a litigation pit? Will they use it to microfund workshops all over the world? Are they planning to do more outreach? If so where and how?
I’m not looking for a detailed step by step project plan. But something directional would be great. What will “version 5” give to the world compared to “version 4”?
If they can’t answer that then Precious Plastic is indeed in trouble. But the trouble is not from any of those mentioned stresses, but from a lack of vision and direction.
I've seen this play out more than once during my career and startups with otherwise great concepts end up treading water because the founding team or leadership fails to execute.
Being a charismatic sales person might work wonders in terms of attracting funding and talent but it's not enough if you lack the capability to follow through with it. I'd wager that lots of the latest batch of startups that want do-it-all 'product engineers' will collapse for the exact same reason: delegating vision.
It's always been my job to Make Things Happen, as opposed to "Make Things Look Like They're Happening."
A lot of "Making Things Happen" is boring and un-sexy, but absolutely crucial.
I'm always surprised, when I run into folks that are awesome at schmoozing and getting folks to come to the party (I'm not so good at that stuff), and may be extremely creative and talented, but lack the follow-through, to make their dreams a reality.
It's usually when folks like that, team up with folks like me, that magic happens. Rarely, you have it in one person.
https://community.preciousplastic.com/map
https://community.preciousplastic.com/map
However I heard "from the system" that manufacturers are not interested in the world knowing exactly what they produce, why, where it ends up and what their contribution to our plastic soup is (surprise surprise). It's a sick system of you ask me. The law (so us citizens) should set the incentives.
Still, people making nice things from waste is always good. But I would be a bit worried about the fumes and dusts coming from these materials though. Where I worked we didn't laser-cut poly-carbonate for example because it would produce airborne endocrine disrupting substances...
[0] https://research.qut.edu.au/cms/projects/macromolecular-barc...
The laser cutter is not necessarily a good comparison for safety considerations. By definition, a laser cutter burns the materials it cuts. With equipment that melts plastic - like injection molding machines or FDM 3D printers - burning the material just means that you did it wrong, your temperature was too high - and you will not get a useful product.
What people do on their own is another matter - but hey, that's apparently just human (see all the chainsaw heroes in safety flip flops, the people running SLA printers in their dorm room, all the soldering that goes on without a fan/filtration, ...)
We have a lot of knowledge on how to literally burn plastic and not pollute anything- waste really doesn't have to be an issue.
The micro plastics that studies find in the human body are probably from sources no one cares to address- acrylic paint, tires, polyester clothing, things that are constantly being ground into nano particle size bits that are omni-present in all environments (and no one even considers getting rid of).
If you live in a first world country the ocean plastic isn't from you- if you drink from a plastic straw or not it probably doesn't matter. That plastic is most likely from fishing nets and from a few countries where people throw their waste directly into a few rivers.
People would rather focus on shaming those who don't sort their trash and drink from plastic straws.
> If you live in a first world country the ocean plastic isn't from you
I live in Ireland and I’m not sure that’s the case for us. Plastic was collected in the recycling bins and then shipped to China for processing. I was always skeptical of the environmental soundness of shipping plastic to the other side of the planet – and the lack of transparency about what happens to the plastic waste after. I always wondered if any plastic that wasn’t PET was just dumped in a river or the sea. A few years ago, China stopped accepting plastic refuse from Western countries so the plastic was sent to other Southeast Asian countries but they also find it to be not economically viable to process. I looked into this issue before but found it hard to get solid evidence that the plastic is actually recycled. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of the plastic that is collected in the West for “recyling” ends up in the ocean, while we in the west pat ourselves on the back for doing the “right thing”.
Personally, I do my best to Reduce and Reuse rather than Recycle.
https://wts.com/global/publishing-article/20240508-plastic-t...
https://environment.ec.europa.eu/topics/plastics/single-use-...
People with brooms are not an argument for people making a mess to carry on what they are doing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_producer_responsibili...
> Passing responsibility to producers as polluters is not only a matter of environmental policy but also the most effective means of achieving higher environmental standards in product design
It's a super material, it needs to cost as much as competing natural materials: nylon - silk, whatever plastic bottles are made of - glass/aluminum, whatever packaging is made of - paper/textiles, whatever containers are made of - wood/steel/aluminum/etc. Similar story for paints.
Basically, excises, but for plastic instead of just alcohol and tobacco.
We do this, plastic starts being used just where it really makes sense.
Down voters: why not comment why not? The market is clearly failing. I count a possible solution is 50+ years as failure.
We need to cut down on producing it first, recycle it second, and then bury it as deep as possible.
If your nation is diverting enough organic waste from household waste, and has enough low carbon generation in the grid mix then the calculus changes and you can start worrying about the fossil plastic in the mix, but the biggest impact there is to intercept the plastic early and recycle it.
You mean 're-use' rather than 'recycle'?
It has always been 'reduce, reuse, recycle' but what bemuses me is how this is nigh on impossible for normal people, even those that do their recycling and say the right things about caring for the planet.
Being serious about it means an end to having a consumerist lifestyle. This can be difficult when kids are involved. Mountains of plastic are just there with kids, in everything they do. You can't take your child out of society to live as if it was two centuries ago, their friends and the parents of their friends will have this abundance of plastic, whether it is LEGO bricks or food containers. It is just unavoidable. Capitalism as we know it would collapse if we got serious about plastic.
I am quite serious about plastic, albeit by accident. On a whim I went 'whole food, plant based', which means no processed foods or animal products. One unintended consequence is that my recycling and rubbish shrunk to a fraction of what it used to be. I no longer have plastic trays, plastic bottles and what not, just a few plastic bags, a few tins, a few glass jars and a modest amount of paper.
If I am lucky enough to get a good plastic container, I really will upcycle it.
If I meet up with relatives that live the middle class life, then, vegetable peelings aside, they will create more waste in a weekend than I will create in approximately four months.
I enjoy not having the cognitive dissonance that goes on with buying single use plastic containers whilst knowing that nothing really gets recycled. I am also 'beginner level' when it comes to the art of being 'zero waste', there are those that create no more than a small jar full of plastic in a year.
My relatives genuinely believe they are doing their bit by putting lots of plastic in the recycling, and they would frown upon someone that did not follow their example. They live in a very different consumerist world to me. But, if everyone lived like me, there would not be a lot of the economy left!
People are deeply wedded to their single use plastics. Realistically, cutting down on plastic means an end to the plastic foods that most people enjoy eating, whether that be ready meals, take outs, animal products, produce from far-flung parts of the world and sugary beverages.
A century ago, nobody had anything plastic. Given our consumerist ways, you wonder how people lived back then, when most domestic waste consisted of ash from fireplaces.
A ban on single use plastics is what we need, not any Band Aid recycling solutions. You never see LEGO bricks or anything valuable in the plastic recycling stream, all of it is single use plastics. But a ban on single use plastics would mean people paying for a lot of glass, steel and waxed paper. This comes with problems of its own.
Imagine you are driving a truck load of yoghurts from Italy, over the Alps, through France and to the UK so that middle class people can buy them. If those yoghurts have to be in glass jars then the diesel bill for this important middle class delivery will rise considerably, due to the extra weight of the glass. More CO2 would be emitted getting these vital yoghurts from industrial unit to toilet bowl.
Not buying the yoghurts is not an option as the mind-numbingly boring job of driving the truck hundreds of miles is considered gainful employment. Therefore, 'reduce' is not really an option, so that means 'recycle' or landfill. Anecdotally, as in my instance, 'reduce' is definitely possible and definitely the way to go, but, given how most people live, it is a total non-starter, mostly because it would require dietary changes.
And the remaining 10% can be burned, of course.
The machines are all FAR too small and fancy/expensive to really make much sense. I've seen some more practical offshoots from PP that design larger machines with recycled materials etc, and consequently they have sustainable businesses around the world.
So, most of all, as is clear from the post, they never really even tried - in over a decade - to make it a viable, self-sustaining enterprise, of any sort.
Also, what's conspicuously missing from the post is their Portugal-based Precious Plastic Camp boondoggle, which always struck me as a hipster commune more than anything.
They also suddenly deleted the original forums, which contained lots of fantastic info.
So, I don't have much faith that throwing more good money after bad would help at all. I'm grateful for the inspiration and excitement that they brought into the world, but it's time for them to be recycled.
And, yet, I expect they'll con someone into helping revive them for version 5, 6 and beyond. That's the way of the non-profit world.
In fact, I am ashamed by association. Their burn rate is low (~$30,000/year now, though likely higher before) and the value they generate for everyone else has clearly been very high, even just in intangibles. They sound like a public good, and you hang them out to dry for not being... a profitable corporation? Is there an alternate universe where you toss libraries under the bus as well, when they fail to pay their way like bookstores? (I'm curious if anyone has feelings, why or why not this is a reasonable comparison for me to make.)
You (and those voting/speaking to your worldview) are likely materially collapsing something from existing through creating a narrative here. Which is meaningful because this community is likely one that could step up -- with a deep understanding of open source, and wealth through tech associations and profits.
Is your take worth that? Sink or swim, creators and gift-givers? Is PP universally bad enough that you wish for that to be your contribution here?
The strongest is simply that the machines/educational materials they produce are simply not practical, useful, or accessible. It's, as many other comments have said, performative.
Conversely, there's plenty of great and little-known organizations around the world who HAVE built productive, sustainable organizations around small-scale recycling - by designing their own devices.
Moreover, as many other comments have pointed out, there's never been any accountability (again, not just in a financial sense. Though, the figures are also quite murky, such that you're citing numbers that are far too low). There's no plan other than "give us more money and THEN we'll put in some effort to come up with and share a new plan". These are not serious people.
Theyre seemingly decent and nice enough, but do not merit further support - let alone celebration. There's plenty of others in the world who are far more deserving of help, but don't have the cool marketing platform that PP does.
The article you're commenting on says their quarterly expenses are 34k
A charity or a non-profit organisation is funded by donors. Non-profit doesn't mean 'loss making', it means that all of the money is re-invested in the organisation to support it as a going concern, rather than paying it all out to shareholders or, in the case of PP, re-donating it to their community.
So it's perfectly reasonable to want such an organisation to be, well, financially sound. That way it can continue to make the impact it does, or even increase that impact through growth.
If that doesn't happen then you haven't donated to support a sustainable mission, you simply funded a one-off project. In any other situation this would be seen as catastrophic mismanagement and there'd be some accountability for it.
Dead Comment
I’ve also followed PP from the initial grant in Paris but a lot of these problems seem to be self-inflicted. Ones that most stood out were having no insurance, unrealistic open source expectations and giving $100k away rather than furthering the cause.
I’m sure theres minutiae and context i’m missing but that post doesn’t scream competence.
I’m worried any donation would be fluttered away.
The line about being at peace with the project dying seems bizarre. Perhaps time for a little organisational shakeup
Perhaps it's just me but this was the line that made the most sense to me. If a non-profit thinks they've achieved their mission, or at least that they don't have a good plan for next steps, then the most sensible thing to do is to close shop rather than to spend money unnecessarily.
Precious Plastic have designed various DIY plastic processing machines for what is essentially hobby use. That's fine, whatever, but for about the same cost I can just buy a commercially-made machine. A manual injection molding machine or a benchtop filament extruder is just a thing you can buy on AliExpress. If you wanted to set up a half-serious plastics business, you could buy an old Boy or Arburg injection molding machine on eBay for close to scrap value. If you want to feed that machine on recycled plastic, reprocessed pellets and regrind are a cheap commodity product.
The problems that remain in plastic recycling are mainly really complex engineering and material science problems, because re-melting inevitably degrades the quality of polymers. Those issues are being slowly chipped away at by serious researchers in academia and industry.
I don't doubt their sincerity, but feel-good aspirations rarely solve much of anything.
I kind of sort of agree with your points about the manual machines but Aliexpress was not as prevalent as it it is now 10 years ago and it's not as if there were already lots of open source blueprints for injection molders, extrusion machines and the like (unlike for example in the 3D printing space), so the knowledge built up and shared by PP is still useful.
I guess it's also a pretty human thing to want to tinker with making your own machines and share them (if not, there also would not be a bajillion static site generators, notes apps and whatnot in the software world).
I don't really agree about your points about the industrial injection molding machines, though. Sure, if you want to produce many of the same parts, that's ultimately the way to go. However, if you want to do small-series stuff, experiment with different ways of making molds, do educational hands-on stuff and so on - which is what PP is much more about than maximizing output - a manual machine is much more appropriate.
Anecdote: I regularly had people from (university) departments who have all sorts of professional injection moulding equipment use our - in comparison ridiculously primitive - setups. Because it was much easier, much faster and the "vibe" in a Precious Plastics lab is usually also very different than in a research lab (and that's also not to be underestimated if it's more about development/experiments/learning than about maximizing output).
Also: Fucking around with old hydraulics can be a rather dangerous activity and requires some safety considerations not relevant in manual machines.
If someone was taking a $500k salary from donated funds, I'd feel it's a con. I see nothing to that effect.
People without a clue sometimes pick up a clue after some time. Donors donate for a variety of reasons. There are angel investors who donate simply because they want to push a concept along, or want to help nice people.
If someone wealthy decides to support them instead of e.g. buying a supercar or a $10M painting, I think it's all good.
Live and let live.
They seem like decent enough people, but completely incapable of running a project like this. Which is what a significant portion of the non-profit world is made up of.
I don't think its all good though if someone donates to keep it alive - there's many FAR more worthy organizations to give money to, be it for plastic or any other cause. And, quite often, those that receive large amounts of funds are far better at marketing (or, worse, playing "the game"), than actually operating
Dead Comment
Also: the original forums aren't suddenly deleted: https://davehakkens.nl/community/forums/index.html He explains the process of migrating into 'One Army': https://davehakkens.nl/index.html
As for the forum, its been a while since I've looked at any of their stuff. But I am quite certain that there was a period where the forum had disappeared. Someone even managed to copy/fork the forum. I can't find it right now though. I'll share it if I find it.
Lots of cross over with Open Source Ecology's Global Village Construction kit[0] where they attempted to create open source versions of 50 technologies they considered critical for civilization. They made a brick press and a tractor but I think progress slowed after that
[0] https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/
"The machines are all FAR too small" They've given you the design, you can easily scale it larger.
"expensive" then move on.
"they never really even tried" they tried more than you. They built it, and release the plans. Mission accomplished. If you even bothered reading their post where they say once the project is complete, they walk away for a while.
"hipster commune" and what is wrong with that?
"deleted the original forums" perhaps there was a reason?
"it's time for them to be recycled" it's time for you to be recycled
"they'll con" thems are fighting words and you should expect a lawsuit
"That's the way of the non-profit world" I doubt you've even given but I'm sure you've taken. take your money to your grave
Even cash won’t save you if you don’t know how to budget and plan.
i'm not sure if people here comprehend how much work it is to do and sustain something like this for almost a decade. a lot of the work is niche community-building, it's a hard slog fought one workshop at a time. its like herding idealistic cats, not easy. i will always appreciate those who hold the line and choose to die on weird hills like this.
while i commend them on their work to date, it's clear that this is a hard problem to solve within our current socio-economic environment. after all, plastic is around us, within us, and inevitably part of us now. as humans we need to stop burying it and confront what we are doing.
The fact that no one has any accurate figures is just one of many issues with this project and plea for help.
I don't think this is true, but I do think it's more than 2x harder to be both effective and well-meaning.
Getting things done without doing anything shady or unethical is sort of like winning a race while running on one leg.
And I see no mention that they have any plans to not do it again
This is such a weird critique to me. Their goal is to create a community… giving $$ to the community is furthering their goal.
We're already burning things for power, might as well have that crude oil take a detour into consumer products for a while first, and because it's useful in several ways, make it last in line to eliminate (and at the same time offsetting some oil/coal/gas production)
I would love to open a workspace. Full stop.
However, due to the price of the shredder and the tools required to transform the plastic into new forms; One needs to have a dedicated space with a lot of power. Then you need to secure a source of plastic. You would think this part would be easy, I mean that is the whole premise of this org's existence, right? You would be wrong in that assumption. There is big money in "recycling" in the US. From the collection, sorting, and distribution of recycled materials... someone already has a contract to legally "do it."
I am bummed to see them in this position. There seems to be a few hotspots around the world where this would really work. They aren't near me, that is for sure.
And “several sheets per day”. Ouch.
If I were seeing a plastic recycling facility on How It’s Made I would expect to see a continuous feed system, with elaborate heat scavenging systems to preheat the ingredients while cooling the product.
I’m not sure how you scale such a thing down to cottage industry scale. Preheating to around 60° could be reasonably done by amateurs but this stuff goes up to at least 350° to melt plastic.
Working with those temps probably not appropriate for an office environment, but on a porch or well-ventilated garage, should economically outperform 110V pretty well.
Could you elaborate on how the machines are expensive? Did you want to buy or build them?
There might even already be a drop off point near you https://community.preciousplastic.com/map