We've just launched our map. Add yourself by clicking here!
Precious Plastic Version 4? 😮
- This topic has 160 replies, 107 voices, and was last updated 1 year ago by
.
You might have been aware that we launched Precious Plastic Version 3 a few months back. Maybe. We made many new things, introduced the bazar, container workspace, a series of art objects, a map for collaboration, more techniques and a way for the community to share their own tutorial videos. Quite a lot. Our main focus for this version was on expanding the platform and making it easier for people to collaborate.
This period is really fun for us. Seeing what the community, you guys do with the information. Always exciting to see if its used the way we intended. But besides observing we also gather feedback, comments, posts, topics we see or improvements we could do. And I can’t help myself, but slowly I think about what a V4 would look like.
So thats where this topic is for. To share your ideas, suggestions,improvements. What would you like Precious Plastic to work on and improve next? Throw it in here! Together we set the course 💪
*Oh and I might look inactive every now and then because i don’t leave a reply but I read all of it. No kidding.
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3223723 Hi , i would like to share this bad made concept that need to be realized and tested.
I hope u can find a reasonable way to produce and commercialize it. (in my dreams).
Was just an exercise, thought to be made in wood (scrap) with roller skate wheels, may it be entirely produced with recycled plastic ? (i think yes).
Does it worth ? (maybe looks like i’m far away from the global market reality :D)
If that may be done, for sure an Hollander Beater (for pulping materials) may be done 😛 (ok this may got too far).
Hope you find this some kind of useful.
Thanks
A
Would be a great to find a way to introduce the ecocoin In the Precious Plastic Community.
Attachments:
Hello, I apologize if these are ideas that have been discussed elsewhere.
1. Experiment minimum resource blade production by using hole saws. This would undoubtedly be tedious work but it would at least create a feasible option for developing countries.
2. Experiment with freezing flexible plastics like trash bags to prevent them from clogging machines.
3. Create “hot plastic gun” by either modifying a hot glue gun or caulk gun.
4. Ideas for simple plastic type stamps. We should really be marking every product we make with the appropriate stamp.
5. (Just a general idea) Trash collecting hikes as a community outreach event.
6. A section of the community website reserved for resource sharing. Honesty google drive is what I’m thinking when I say this. Maybe I should create a separate thread asking for other people’s emails and create/organize a google drive so we can continue to collaborate. Can I have other people’s thoughts on this?
Hi there,
My daughters Kindergarten is running a waste and litter project and we discussed how we could give more awareness to plastics and recycling. A simple teaching toolkit would be a great contributor to early education. Something similar than the chemistries boxes you can purchase for education. No big shredder needed if plastic foil or similar could be used for small batch / examples.
Hello everybody,
I’m new in the community because unfortunatley I’ve discover your fantastic project only in these days.
The reason why I’m so interested in your project is because I have 2 daughters (3 and 5 years old) and I’m afraid for theire future. This summer I will go in Indonesia for holidays and I’ve discover that there is the one of most plastic pollutet sea in the world.
What I think about your project is the follow:
– the concept and the mission is really feel by the world
– you have just create a great community
– there are a lot of idea about how recicle, what recicle and machine develops
So ideas, community and technical issues are ok, but a focused and shared target is missing, follow I explaine better:
– if I read the topics there isn’t a common target (i.e.: for the end of april we have to develop the version 4.0)
– in the most earth’s polluted zone there aren’t so much activities (workshop, bazar..)
– the product in the bazar are commodity (plates, lamps, box, bowls) so the risk is that people buy these products and after 20 years they put again in the trash and we come back with the same problem.
So my proposal for version 4.0 is the follow:
– Create a project challenge (people with a target work more focused), where the challenge is develop a new product (i.e.: sit, table, dresses, ..)
– The challenge could be choose with a survey using for example Doodle
– The survey has to be voted by the marketing people, this kind of people have the power to rise up the ”business”, so eliminate pollution (this is our common target)
– when the project is choose, is the time for the developers, your community has a wide part of people with a lot of technical skills that can improve the project
– when the concept phase is ok, is again the time for markenting and sellers people to do ”theire job”
2 very important things:
– the project proposal must have the target to realize something useful in the most polluted earth zone (if I recicle something in Germany for example, to realize a new bowl, we don’t eliminate the pollution in Indonesia..)
– each project step must have ONLY 1 responsible and a time line
This is a draft path of project management that I really want to share with you, I hope that you catch the message like a constructive proposal.
I’m at your disposal to discuss about it to realize and implement this kind of approach if you are interested, or if you know someone else that can work in this way, I will be glad to collaborate.
Best regards,
Marco
@themorris, hey there! thanks for your suggestions. I am commenting here because we’ve mutual impressions. just to let you know, the team in Eindhoven is fully booked til the end of the year. I am not aware of a free project management position on the v4 team. For now it’s rather a loose pool of people trying things in different directions. About areas with no coverage: please lets not forget that initial idea of PP was to turn plastic waste into something ‘precious’, later on it was about recycling bigger quantities (ongoing, also covered in v4) and parallel to both directions it become somewhat a sanctuary for DIY enthusiasts. However, covering the east or any non european areas is really difficult. We have NGO clients reporting us frequently to get machines over there. I am not quite sure PP should have this as goal at all but there endless initiatives from within the areas itself but obviously, nobody can re-invent plastic recycling 😉 As machine builders I can tell you, it’s insane expensive to get anything out of the EU. The only thing you could do from here is creating a network and funnel funding to organisations/individuals who build the thing from scratch which is pretty difficult too since you need way less cost excessive machines as now..
You’re also definitely right about missing details and ready-to-go receipts to get people going with different budgets but as far I know v4 will address some of it.
@pporg thank you for your reply and explanations. So, who have the lead to manage the PP V4.0? Because I just want to ask the method of project management that is followed to eventually suggest some tips about..
Another question (sorry but I repeat: I’m new in the community and I don’t now how it works): with the award of 300’000 € what’s happend? How do you reinvest these money? It’s plausible to think to buy some machines and send in the east zones to create some startup where there is the real necessity to clean the planet?
Thank you again
i think it’s rather handled as commissions, not as a ‘project’ per se. hard to say, they never published information about all this. about cleaning planet, recent studies rather showed it’s all too late, no what matter we do now. about the 300K, no idea either, i hope Dave put the half under this pillow to have a decent living sometime, i think it’s rather all gone. PP isn’t a normal organization, i think they don’t want too much liability or transparency, etc… no idea what’s going on…
sending machines to the east ? most machines are already there or coming from there 🙂
@themorris if you like to contribute, we could need a hand. we’ve setup 3 commissions, translations (spanish, catalan, french and german for now), the Precious Plastic version 3.0 – 3.1 manuals and there is endless work about having complete kits, taking all the reports (accidents) as well circumstances into account when shipping PP as a product (warranty, liability safety, etc..). pretty much all to make PP accessible to non-tech|DIY folks such as schools, NGOs, etc… The only final problem seems that PP HQ Eindhoven doesn’t take those user submissions to the main page; at least that’s the state of now so we’re forced to create precious-plastic.org which sucks, considering the overlap (waste) and confusion for everybody at the end 🙁
Hey, I’m kinda new to this site, and I have kind of a weird situation.
I am doing a project for my Intro to Visual Communications college class, in which I must support an organization I truly care about. Since this is a great organization and something I believe should be supported, I chose Precious Plastic and have decided to lend some help if it is needed. If there’s anything I can do when it comes to merchandising (if that’s something y’all would be interested in) and designing said merchandise (once again, only if that’s something you wish to roll with). I am willing to help out and will do my best!
Regards, Olivia
This is a great product to make using recycled plastic, and it is a great story. Also, if the PP community could start making the benches, PRECIOUSPLASTIC.COM could be CNC routed into the back rest to help spread awareness.
https://www.babble.com/parenting/sammie-vance-buddy-benches/
Thank you DAVE for ALL that you have done!!
@stampro01 , @jobbew , Have either of you, or anyone else tried the bench metal shear for cutting (especially thick) plastic? I’m thinking of getting one of these. It may be an easy way to generate medium size flakes from things like detergent bottles, etc.
Attachments:
@s2019, works well, you won’t regret it, just make sure you can feed metal sheet as well (min. 1.5mm); this old tony has a sweet take on this one 🙂
@chep, the article you linked here says 250$ for a bench; I couldn’t even run the electricity needed with this budget making such bench 🙂
@jobbew , Thank you for the reply. Yes, I want to use it for things that are too thick to do easily or safely with a utility knife. Fortunately my injection machine will accept strips of the 3×10 cm scale so I don’t have to make that many detail cuts.
Are you using the shear that you posted last year? That looks like a 200 to 300 mm blade.
@s2019 the effective blade-length is about 10-15 cm, think I can make precise cuts up to 10 cm. For melting they don’t need to be so precise.
Main issue for me is the 1 m long handle, which I would recommend to shorten for plastic cutting. My cutter is quite heavy (and a bit worn out due to heavy use), it can handle steel up to 6 mm, but you dont need a 1 m lever for 6 mm PE. 😉
My recommendation to you would actually be to use a cheap cheap bandsaw. Think that would work way faster. I I think about making – lets say – a 100 strips of plastic with my steel-plate-cutter I would probably get annoyed after piece 50. 😉
Thanks, I think making a plastic specific handle (30 cm?) may be the way to go. I try to avoid using a saw because of all the plastic debris it makes.
I just watched the V4 update vid and recently I’ve been getting into biogas production from food scraps. I’m wondering if the machines can use gas as power for heating the plastic in some instances? (or maybe gas micro turbines for electricity generation?) Better to use gas you generate yourself rather than let it turn to gas in landfill and get emitted to the air, or if your local council is organized get turned into electricity and sent back to you at a cost.
I’m new to precious plastic so hope this idea hasn’t been raised a million times already!
Hi @kelld
It certainly hasn’t been discussed a miilion times – but the subject of biogas has cropped up occasionally.
Just go to http://onearmy.world/community/forums/ and search for biogas.
It is a good topic, IMO, and one that should be discussed more 😉
Searching for some Waste manager machine Look what I found for cardboards and their washing .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-316A4g0eg
See this you will surely get idea for washing problems.
I’m still in favor of combining a washer and a blender.
Big tub or barrel, handheld cement mixer with adjusted (or just sharpened) blade(s), wash and shred!
Should be easy to test.
I think it would be really cool if it was possible to use recycled materials to make more shredders. Even a plastic blade shredder that can be used on soft, thin, plastics, like the walls of milk cartons. This would allow for rapid production of shredder parts leading to faster assembly of more shredder 🙂
Indeed, hence the ‘blender’.
A shredder is brute force, in which the material used needs to be way harder than the material shredded. In a blender it just needs to be ‘faster’.
You would need to replace the knife quite often, but this is easy in a blender.
A shredder, not that much…
@wexymeche, that’s correct; i am somehow looking at @s2019 ‘s work since he came along: it would enable a pretty cheap way to make all parts for a lego like system to build a shredder; at least for soft materials that would do. you can even screw grinded metal kinfes on the blades; same for the stationary counter ‘blades’. damn, i need 5 lifes or mini-me-s …
You must be logged in to reply to this topic.
