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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?

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

One of the BIGGEST requirement for change is to *bring about a community*. Perhaps "technically" they haven't been "the best", but their major value has been creating a community of people who care and demand change. And that's a lot more than many people commenting here from their sofa could claim

A community around recycling reminds me of the article "We wash our trash to repent for killing God". Like some commenters in this discussion I believe plastic recycling is a distraction at best.

What is there to "believe"? Precious Plastic collects and creates some knowledge, furthers the education of many people around the world and transforms some stuff that would have otherwise gone to waste to useful things. I really do not understand the mental contortions one needs to undertake to judge such things as somehow negative. Is no project that doesn't scale enough to solve all the problems in a domain worthy of undertaking?

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?

There's definitely some people here who are against the entire concept of recycling plastic.

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).

Huh? Football fans regularly produce significant costs for the tax payer by way of the huge police and cleanup activities needed for big games, for example.

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".

> a Football fan, an archer, a woodworker

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.

Are you seriously somehow annoyed by other people volunteering and working together on something they care about because of moral and/or other reasons and talk about it? How much time of your day do you spend in a bad mood about churches, the red cross, volunteer firefighters, your desktop environment of choice or all those other contexts where humans do that?!

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.

> churches

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.

Distraction from what? Yes, taxing plastic/pollutants would be ideal. Designing new biodegradable synthetics would be great.

But this organisation has inarguably done good in the world. There's no need to detract from that.

The community exists. You don't need to give money to people who are clearly bad with it in order to continue building that community.

>Their burn rate is low (~$30,000/year now, though likely higher before)

The article you're commenting on says their quarterly expenses are 34k

Still low...

I'm struggling to understand how the numbers make sense. The One Army patreon alone shows 1600 paid members, with the minimum paid tier being $7/month. With ~10% fee for Patreon, this should come out to: 1600 * 7 * 0.9 = $10080/month.

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.

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.

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.

Wich machines and organizations do you recommend for recycling plastic?

In your comment you noted (and they note in their post) their work spins off other innovators and it sounds like in a way they represent a movement and an inspiration. They may very well be performative - maybe you might even call them artists rather than engineers or business people. But it sounds like their art creates awareness and inspires a lot of other, as you say, less visible and less performative people and organizations. Why isn’t this alone worth something? Their burn rate seems very small and their performative contribution seems in excess of the capital they detract from others ventures and maybe even creates a certain amount of awareness of the effort broadly?

Note I have no knowledge this is the first I’ve heard of them. The questions above are truly meant as such.

I hate to say it but i sort of agree.

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

They're pleading for funds for version 5... Details of which they'll only work on and share IF they get more money...

If you don't see an issue here, they we can safely preclude you from a future in any sort of investment or management.

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.

The landfill is one of the best outcomes in most recycling scams. The worst is it ends up in the Pacific trash gyre after wasting fossil fuels sending it to a country halfway around the world to be dumped in a river.

I would be surprised if any US trash ends up overseas these days. After China hardcore clamped down on imports of trash both "recycling" and "scrap" back around 2017?, every other country basically immediately fell over themselves to also ban imports because a tsunami of faux-recycling was going to hit them.

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.

Live and let live.

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

Who would you donate to, if you'd donate to an effort in the "plastic space"?

If I wanted to spend 100k on plastic recycling, I’d start a company with a viable business model. The most probable business model would be shaming big companies into paying me for green washing, so hiring great marketing talent would be top priority. Getting the first companies on board to fund further development would be second.

I appreciate the cynicism but who would you donate to?

The Ocean Cleanup immediately comes to mind. I very much doubt that they're even slightly "sustainable" in a financial sense, but their engineering and logistics efforts seem to be serious, and outcomes meaningful.

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.

I will mention. Ocean Cleanup has a 55 million Euro budget. Precious Plastic is being criticized for having squandered a 100k donation. That 550 times less.

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.

I agree with almost everything, except that it's a problem if someone donates.

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.

If not having a clue was a crime every startup founder would be in jail.

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.

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

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.

I look at the PP machines like I would at a traditional toolroom mill or a standard desktop 3D printer: Middle-ground compromises with relatively sharp upper limits (that can often be worked around by putting in way more work). I've actually been in contexts where even the standard PP-machines were too big.

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.

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

[0] https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/

your comment is highly aggressive.

"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