Precious Plastic is in trouble
preciousplastic.com
preciousplastic.com
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?
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.
That seems to misunderstand what they're asking for. As far as I understand, they're asking for money to build version 5, by using everything they built so far. It's not a "ground up rebuild" by any measure, but funding for the next iteration seems to be missing.
> It will mean rebuilding things from the ground up, which requires much more help and resources than before.
In what way is 'ground up rebuild' a misunderstanding of 'rebuilding things from the ground up'?
The video, at the 300s mark (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gTd36cQLzY&t=300s) mentions the current state, and where they are right now, and that they'd need funding to reach the last step. And that it would be a shame to lose the previous steps, when they're "so close" or whatever. So just doing that last step, while keeping the previous ones intact, wouldn't really be "rebuilding from the ground up", at least in my opinion.
But then yeah, the article says "rebuilding things from the ground up" but I'm not sure that's really "tear everything including the community down and start from scratch" but more about how to build "Version 5", about the machines and hardware itself.
But that's me trying to be charitable and understand something that isn't 100% clearly outlined, as you say.
They specifically call out the sustainability of the organisation so if it keeps PP going and even just iterating on V4 or growing it such that they can innovate on V5, that's a good use of funding that could rebuild confidence in the team and keep the overall mission going.
If they plug it all into V5, which doesn't seem to be clearly defined, then at some level that might not be any different than giving away $100k to the community. It's a gamble from a donor's point of view, might as well crowd fund it on kickstarter.
Even the ones getting paid, are making a tiny fraction of what they could in the private sector doing something more greedy with their time.
Life is not all startup exits and stock options. Some folks are actually trying to do good in the world.
Sure, they should have kept the 100k, but giving it away was well aligned with their mission.
Is it not better to be supported in your effort to do good by being able to volunteer for a stable non-profit over many years? That organisation would have a long term presence and huge influence. It could even lobby the local council or government.
In case you’re confused - the church does that and it is 100% dependent on volunteers who believe.
The difference is that startups are generally very motivated to spend their money well, and non-profits are... not.
It's the difference between the profit motive (simple and easy to understand) and just hoping that the nonprofit leadership is individually motivated (which is much more communicated and hard to verify).
When a startup blows up from overspending, a few investors are out their own money. When a nonprofit does, it tends to stiff the well-meaning public that trusted it with their cash.
The two are not the same. Nobody cares about the rich making a bad investment, but whenever a nonprofit blows up it gets so much harder for the remaining ones to raise money.
That strikes me, by far, as the more unrealistic solution.
Right now it’s not serious. It’s literally the gambler’s fallacy - “we failed but we’re so close”
They use that language, verbatim, in the post. Asking you to chase the loss with them. “We’re so close we just need your support!”
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.
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
That kind of unstructured group can advocate for (say) women, but if you add enough structure it becomes a group that writes checks to Democratic candidates. The most effective activist organizations I've been with have been temporary and deal with the structure/structureless/sustainability problem of melting into the crowd and reforming when necessary.
(I suspect one can find under-interpreted arguments in Graeber that support your unpopular claim but...)
In contrast, what seems really interesting (to me, &/or not just HN-blasphemous) is the alternate framing that
Free markets can be extreme left-wing
>That essay is important
In order to NOT be distracted by Freeman's essay, consider that it most likely hasnt ever crossed their minds that markets that look free can have much more intricate structure than the most uh thoughtful institution? Whether structure correlates with sentience is then the nub?
Then there's the apparent counterpoint of a field known as "institutional econs"; not quite as friendly a framing to schizos :(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Graeber
?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21535498
(The HN just for completeness; didn't see any remarkable dismissals there.. ntheless some (schizoid?) comments seemed worthy of being kept in my background eg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21548795 )
https://archive.is/latest/www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/12/0...
>After such a catastrophic embarrassment, orthodox economists fell back on their strong suit—academic politics and institutional power.
I don’t really want to follow through the rest of your thesis.
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...
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.
So that’s actually on them, too.
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.
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.
Have you just always been one (say, for as long as you can think) or did you become one? In the latter case, I'd be very interested in hearing your story of how that happened if you don't mind sharing it. :)
I always worked for companies that were intensely product-focused. My mentors were always "shippers." The last 27 years of my career, was at one of the world's leading optical companies. They were a true customer- and product-oriented company, and I learned a lot from them.
However, the flip side of this, is that I learned a relatively conservative approach, eschewing some level of creativity.
Like I said, the ideal pairing is an ADD idealist, with a “by the book” realist.
For me, there's a real, personal joy, in "finishing." It makes all the "boring" stuff worth it.
The other side of that is when the startup struggles, it's the product and eng team's fault and not the founder's. This is fine if it's clear up-front that they're just bankrolling the op and not actually leading it.
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.
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
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, ...)
https://wts.com/global/publishing-article/20240508-plastic-t...
https://environment.ec.europa.eu/topics/plastics/single-use-...
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.
In that sense, saying "recycle or it'll end up in the ocean" is like saying "eat your food because people are starving in africa". Not only are the cause and effect not related but then people ignore the true underlying causes.
It is your personal choice to consume goods packaged in plastic. If you, as a consumer, continue to eat pre-packaged peaches and apple slices rather than just eating apples and peaches, you are consciously adding to the known problem. Blaming "someone else" doesn't change the decision that you, as an autonomous individual, have made.
Your stance uses the same logic that people use to excuse their impact on climate change. People who are generating trash (specifically plastic trash) are at fault for worsening the problem of excessive plastic trash, full stop. The same way that burning coal worsens the climate problem. The justification that the problem is so big that individuals can't (or shouldn't) change their behaviors is a coping mechanism. It's borderline nihilistic.
You can be absolutist about personal moral choices, but writing this reply used precious resources that are destroying the planet, on a device that almost certainly also contributed to pollution and human misery.
I'm not saying that people shouldn't be informed and make moral and politically influenced decisions, just that the impact of those choices is probably overstated and people weaponize their choices against others for their own gain.
Everyone can individually decide what they can accept, but I don't like it when people say I should buy their thing made out of recycled plastic like it's better for the earth if I do. I don't think that equivalence is obvious if you look at the whole problem.
Fortunately, I live in a state with some of the greenest energy sources in the country. Living here is a choice I make.
I also made the choice to write my comment and "use" those resources. I own that choice and the consequences. My comment simply suggests that you should own your choices and their consequences, too.
==people weaponize their choices against others for their own gain.==
It feels like you are doing a form of this when you dismiss the individual's contributions to global trash issues and outsource the blame to "others." You have gained peace-of-mind by convincing yourself you aren't part of the problem.
The "known problem" is plastic going to the landfill, which is barely a concern. awongh's original comment mentioned two plastic problems worthy of concern - microplastic and ocean plastic. Neither of that is related to disposable plastic going to the landfill.
I think the "known problem" is the consumption of too many products made out of plastic or with plastic packaging which leads to plastic trash. This over-dependence ties directly to the microplastic and ocean plastic problem. According to the WWF [0], there are three main ways that plastic ends up in the ocean:
1. Throwing plastic in the bin when it could be recycled. Plastic you put in the bin ends up in landfill. When rubbish is being transported to landfill, plastic is often blown away because it’s so lightweight. From there, it can eventually clutter around drains and enter rivers and the sea this way.
2. Littering. Litter dropped on the street doesn’t stay there. Rainwater and wind carries plastic waste into streams and rivers, and through drains. Drains lead to the ocean!
3. Products that go down the drain. Many of the products we use daily are flushed down toilets, including wet wipes, cotton buds and sanitary products. Microfibres are even released into waterways when we wash our clothes in the washing machine.
[0] https://www.wwf.org.uk/updates/how-does-plastic-end-ocean
Clothing companies often tout how much of their polyester fibre is from recycled sources. It's ironic how plastic recycling being perceived as "good" contributes to the problem.
Also anecdotally when staying with a friend in a different city I had to break the news that the bin they thought was recycling went into the same truck. They had been separating their recyclables for months. You can try but it might not matter cuz they don't care.
I still try but would be lying if I wasn't a bit bitter they successfully shifted blame onto consumers.
On the issue of transparency, most people think that the Green Dot symbol¹ means an item can be recycled. It was only about 10 years ago that I learned that this just means that “suppliers and producers have contributed financially to the recycling of packaging in Europe”². In Ireland, Repak is an industry-led NGO that was created as a form of green-washing regulatory capture and I presume other European countries have their own equivalent.
¹ https://repak.ie/images/uploads/icons/The_Green_Dot_Symbol.p...
We need to cut down on producing it first, recycle it second, and then bury it as deep as possible.
This is mostly food waste decomposing, which should ideally be diverted.
https://www.epa.gov/land-research/quantifying-methane-emissi...
It's also important to remember that trash isn't just from your hands to the India landfill, there's also industrial waste from the factories that make all our products that gets dumped somewhere cheap near the factory. Even if we shipped no trash to India, our consumption results in garbage dumped there because our products are made there, or near there.
Recycling is what does this.
Hence why you should consider if its better to trash plastic, its probably thermodynamically efficient anyway
Some recycling is bought by other countries, but they buy it to use it, not to stack it into artificial mountains.
https://www.unodc.org/unodc/frontpage/2024/March/explainer_-...
Any source for this?
A lot of plastic waste exports destination are in South-East Asia [0]. In the EU, with all its modern infrastructure and capacities, only 41% of the plastic packaging waste is being recycled [1]. So which portion of the imported plastic waste can we assume will be recycled in Malaysia?
Documentaries [2] and [3] support the opposite thesis as yours, stating that imported plastic waste is imply dumped.
The OECD report on Monitoring trade in plastic waste and scrap [3] indicates that even the ban on hazardous waste (Basel Ban) exports is not having any effect.
[0]: Share of global plastic waste imports, 2021 - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-plastic-waste-imports?time=2021
[1]: 41% of plastic packaging waste recycled in 2022 - https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/ddn-20241024-3
[2]: Your plastic waste might be traded by criminals - https://youtu.be/tID-AChSg7o?t=246
[3]: UK plastic for “recycling” dumped and burned in Turkey - BBC News - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hw6KR2vj_bc
[4]: https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/support-materials/2024/04/monitoring-trade-in-plastic-waste-and-scrap_0c401097/Monitoring%20trade%20in%20plastic%20waste%20and%20scrap%20PH.pdfIf 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.
Plant-based can include some animal products, though. That's the definition I'm familiar with.
Anyway, I'm curious to know how you get your food without packaging. Do you literally grow and can everything yourself?
When I buy salad, it comes pre-washed in a large plastic container. Even when I buy the far more expensive locally grown stuff in the summer, it comes in a plastic bag.
I can get berries in small cardboard boxes, but only during the short window when they're growing locally. Otherwise, if I want berries, my choices are to get them frozen in a plastic bag, or fresh and in a plastic container.
I do buy some foods in steel cans, like beans. If I bought dried beans, they'd come in a plastic bag. Our lentils are shipped in a box and wrapped in a sturdy plastic bag. Then we can get tomatoes in glass bottles.
There are a few things I get without any packaging: bananas, apples, potatoes, onions, broccoli. But those things are in the minority. They are mostly shipped from far away, in bulk in cardboard boxes, I believe. There's another small window when you can get them locally.
And the remaining 10% can be burned, of course.
I happened to do a project on their fluid dynamics at university :)
They don't have to be this tall, if you need lower throughput or if your products don't have wildly different boiling points.
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’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.
If you don't see an issue here, they we can safely preclude you from a future in any sort of investment or management.
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
And I've seen various cottage industries in the developing world grow out of/highlighted by Precious Plastic - ones who provide perhaps 5-30 jobs in poor and polluted areas of the world. A warehouse, some crude but effective machinery for processing the waste.
Ocean Cleanup claims to have removed 21,000 metric tons of plastic in its existence.
If we assume linear growth in budget, that's $330M Euro / 21k ton = 15,000 Euro per ton of garbage.
About 10 million tons of plastic end up in the ocean each year, so over their history, they've cleaned up 0.2% of the annual input.
I can't really comment if any of that good or bad, but I thought numbers (even if squishy estimates) would be helpful to inform the discussion.
Some of the donation game is a competition (for example, applying for grants, or foundation funding), where the dynamic you described dominates. Much of it is not. In many cases, a rich person just cuts a check out of their leisure budget. That's why I compared this to buying a supercar. The rich person learns something, and has something fun to do more constructive than, well, many of the things rich people do.
Money is a social construct; it's just a way of keeping score, and organizing people. At the end, what matters is what you do, and what resources you use. The better question isn't what else the /money/ could be used for, but what else the actual inputs --- the /people, space, and tools/ --- could be used for.
If those same people are making military weapons, optimizing ad clicks, or running cons, that's a negative use of resources.
It's very possible a rich person decides they just want to:
- give a bunch of people space to follow their passion (same as an arts grant);
- view this as a part of personal development (same as giving tuition to a college);
- a research grant (interesting open information will come out, which is perhaps a few steps away from being useful;
- promotion of recycling; or
- just funding this on the off-chance something big comes of it.
It's all good.
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?
And how is it useful or respectful to be judgemental about what other people engage in and form communities around? Is being a Football fan, an archer, a woodworker or whatever in your spare time somehow more valuable or more useful than engaging with recycling, upcycling, tinkering with machines, doing community work and all the other activities that go into a project like PP?
But the topic and difference of this thread is that football fans don't ask you to feed and house them for over a decade, while they do performative art (all while owning 10, unmentioned, hectares of land but claiming homelessness and poverty).
Even if you take the stance that PP is art - artists have asked for money for as long as there has been art. Doesn't seem unusual to me.
Are you referring to the land in Portugal that they also made available to the public and that they made a lot of YouTube videos and other documentation about? I would hardly call that "unmentioned".
None of them has the faux moral aspect of plastic recycling that almost sees disposable plastic use as sinning. None of them has forced paper straws on me.
And if you really insist on continuing with the metaphor: Whenever I lived in certain big cities, the situations before and after football matches most definitely had a more drastic impact on daily life than a slightly soggy straw.
When churches had significant power and shaped the discourse and culture for the worse (I am not so sure if it's worse anymore), I definitely was quite annoyed at them.
But this organisation has inarguably done good in the world. There's no need to detract from that.
The article you're commenting on says their quarterly expenses are 34k
That alone should sunstain them according to the numbers they are giving out themselves. Do the other non-Precious-Placstic parts of their Patreon make up such a big share that not a lot of that goes to Precious Plastics?
I'm less skeptical about Precious Plastic than a lot of people here from an idea standpoint (I think even if it doesn't make a huge impact ecologically, I think its a nice project for educational purposes). However I've become quite weary over the years of projects that don't have a good financial track record asking for many AND are not being transparent enough about their financials to allow potential backers to make sound judgments. If they present as a non-profit (no matter if they are registered as one or not), they should also aim to fulfill best practices about being a non-profit.
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.
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.
Note I have no knowledge this is the first I’ve heard of them. The questions above are truly meant as such.
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.
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.
However, I'd also like to have a bigger shredder and the approach of simplifying it an making it from available resources sounds great. Do you know if concepts like hacking leaf springs have been tried out in the PP project or in another context and if there are machines/blueprints available?
Btw: As far as I know, a lot of the design of the PP-machines has evolved by way of largely self-taught and more or less chaotic experimentation. So, it seemed to me that most of the development work on the machines is actually much closer to the contexts you refer to than it is to fibre lasers and specialized metallurgy.
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
Even cash won’t save you if you don’t know how to budget and plan.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Then those dregs got composted and used on the landscaping.
There are ways to co-generate fuel for this but I don't want to lose the larger message that PP is producing toy solutions no matter how you zhuzh them up.
Could they get over that in version 5? Probably. But more likely on 6 or 7, and more likely still for another entrepreneur to scoop them and make something real.
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
The value of Precious Plastic has long-since been realized - it inspired some actually-practical people to start making cottage recycling industries in the developing world, which has helped provide some employment and divert some plastic from rivers.
This… sounds like a very good problem to have?
A good solution with unfortunately perverse incentives. Probably the solution is government bans on unnecessarily wasteful uses of plastics. The market is provably incapable of tackling environmental issues without regulatory encouragement.
This seems to bounce back and forth, for awhile it was save the trees, now it's cut down trees to save the world apparently?
The great wind and solar scam was founded on lies, built on myth and runs on subsidies. But with Donald J Trump in the White House the scale of the fraud is finally being revealed.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/plasma-gasi...
This wouldn’t be a problem for a very long time. The reason so much of this waste ends up being landfilled or shipped overseas is due to a lack of capacity in existing waste-to-energy plants. It isn’t quite like the perverse-incentive problem introduced by biomass facilities because the waste is going to be generated regardless.
If waste reduction is a problematic catalyst for more production and pollution, … We have a problem even bigger than I thought.
I would hope that would not be the case, but apparently recycling theater successfully reduced efforts to push back on the supply side.
Our self-created problems are becoming ridiculous. By the time the ultra rich are chocking on plastic in their caviar the rest of us will already be plasticized.
A machine equivalent to the precious plastics shredder will likely cost you a similar amount. Probably more with shipping… and tariffs until the taco tacos.
https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Plastic-Crusher-Equip...
I see this same “pc180” elsewhere for about $1500, so i’d guess that’s what it’d cost when you actually try to buy it.
Maybe I’m wrong, maybe that only applies to the couple machines I have looked into and not this one.
edit: If you don't want to build a machine, you can find vendors through the PP Bazar[1]. Even fancy ones with CE and made from wood somewhere in Austria :D [2]
Take an honest assessment of how you can meaningfully contribute and concentrate on that, and pass the reins over to someone else who specializes in handling reins. Where are you best? Pushing forward on a long-held vision, planting a flag in the ground and rallying everyone to it, while ignoring petty concerns like a positive balance sheet? Great! Delegate that latter one to someone who specializes in it and then cooperate & thrive with them.
On the other hand, the plastic industry needs reform. Only about 1/3 of plastic produced is recycled in practice, and even then only once. Hardly the recyclable miracle that the plastic lobby has been messaging on since at least the 1990s. And what is the industry's response? Increased production YOY! Want truly recyclable materials, in practice? Glass. Steel, and some other metals. Fibers, like paper, to an extent.
That being said, I see a need for "base-load" plastic. Plastic is useful and we may forever need it, until at least something better comes along. Particular in key single-use applications like health services.
Start a Business from Plastic Waste - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26860992 - April 2021 (98 comments)
Precious Plastic Version 4 [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21986375 - Jan 2020 (12 comments)
Precious Plastic Version 3.0 aims to fix plastic pollution - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15497732 - Oct 2017 (35 comments)
PreciousPlastic – An Open Source Plastic Recycling Workshop - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11381530 - Mar 2016 (2 comments)
It reads as though they're begging people not to bail them out.
Like... in all of that, there isn't a single detail about how they aren't going to kneecap themselves again. (And, considering their track record, that seems inevitable, if not imminent.)
This should be taken down, and whoever has been doing these things should write up a plan for what they might do to prevent the truly obscene mismanagement laid out in the article from continuing. Perhaps ask for advice? Or, more likely, stop ignoring advice that many people must surely have been giving them.
Without that, they are seemingly just going to continue wasting the time, and money, of anyone who might get involved with their project.
(Also, the random pot shot at open source in general was unnecessary, irrelevant, and bitter. If they wanted people who use their software to give something back, then they should have licensed it accordingly.)
[1] https://community.preciousplastic.com/questions/questions-on...
However after a period of time an accident happened with someone using the machine, which was very unfortunate. And in the US, especially NY this means you need to get lawyers. What happened, who is responsible? Is it the company that hired us all, Precious Plastic (back then operating under One Army Entity) for organising it, was it a result of bad operational instructions, misuse of the machine or a fault in the machine from the community member?
IMO their shredder does not look very safe. It's a device that can cause digital amputation and entanglement and operators are exposed to it 100% of the time they're using the machine, which would classify it as a high-risk hazard. It really should have guarding to make the hazard inaccessible, like a longer infeed chute and a start/stop interlock that prevents it from running unless there's a bin underneath. I suspect it's going to be hard to argue that procedure & policy were appropriate ways to address the risk.
Its a scam after all, we know also well from others.
The real issue with plastic recycling is twofold: it is a dead end and recycled plastics shed microplastics like crazy. Other materials, such as metals, can effectively be infinitely recycled, but plastic cannot; recycled plastic is worse than virgin plastic in every way. It also destroys the environment around us, because recycled plastics are effectively really shitty plastics that shed everywhere.
In short, plastic recycling is a fraud perpetuated by greenwashing initiatives. The only proper thing to do with old plastic is to incinerate it at high temperatures that achieve complete combustion. This is rare though; most plastic is burned at low enough temperatures that it causes pollution.
Great stuff, plastic, huh?
Just look at the "wonderful" products they make from recycled plastic: https://www.preciousplastic.com/solutions/prods
Each and every one of them is a low-quality, microplastic-shedding abomination. You can literally see their surface crumbling. Now imagine what UV and heat cycling does to mystery meat plastic like this. Horrible quality, bad for the environment, bad for humans. Stop doing it.
That's an asshole thing to do. Nothing is more petty than municipal politics, especially if amplified by a pandemic.
"The sky is going to fall if something isn't done about the 40-year-old Chrome-6! Everyone must GTF out of that building, right NOW!"
It's a dick move.
Site remediation is slow and really expensive, but better than organ failure or cancer. Chrome salts can be particularly bad with low LD50 ratings. =3
If that’s not what you’re doing then it doesn’t matter. But I read your blurb and then met the video at the fold and instinctively hit back.
then i went to read the comments here, current count 65
i don't get a sense that the people interested in this topic agree on anything, except "it's of some, but not too much, importance"
i do, however, get a sense that the people interested in this are in a distinct minority. i am always happy when a distinct minority gets their day in the sun and I get to learn about them.
but this is rough part that everyone need to eat and sometimes being a business is not bad idea at all
If you have six months of funds, left to operate, then count your blessings and be grateful and be creative bro
come on now why are you complaining?
Precious Plastics designs, sells and operates plastic processing and recycling equipment, including crucibles, presses, extrusion presses, sheet presses, injection molding machines, shredders, graders. You can buy the equipment or download the drawings for free, it's open source.
Precious Plastics operates a partner network of plastic recyclers and processors. Especially in developing countries where industrial scale recycling infrastructure doesn't already exist, this allows plastic recycling to happen in situations where it would otherwise go in a landfill.
Precious Plastics has a small, human centric ideal embedded in its culture and messaging. It's based around the idea of a small machine in a garage operated as a hobby with others in the local community, not a vertically integrated industrial behemoth.
Does that cover it well?
So I asked?
Then bumped their design cost out of hobby budgets, and ignored safety warnings about steam blow-outs with molten plastics for decades.
The math doesn't math... ymmv =3