Precious Plastic is in trouble

Moving a machine shop is not easy. A decent knee mill is about 2000 lbs. Disassembly is possible but you need a hoist or crane of some sort. Then you have to lift that into a vehicle like a pickup truck, trailer or box/flat bed truck. Then repeat the process at the storage location, then all again to move it to the new location. It seems the people involved did not want to or have the ability to tackle this. Paying a rigger is possible but the cost is very high.

I'll just assume they sold below cost to get people to bring their own equipment to take the machinery away at zero cost to them.

They ARE "the community" that should be turning that money into actually useful things. Non-profits should not donate money. They should spend it or allocate it as grants.

I think that a charity that just funnels money to other charities is very suspicious and needs to be really on top of its stuff to not just seem like an enterprise for skimming money off other people's goodwill.

I would imagine a condition of the funding would be to restructure and get the right people in place to continue the mission, ideally more responsibly.

Like, the entire article is saying "we fucked up in various ways" but there is no accountability piece to speak of. Just an ask for more money for a ground up rebuild.

There's a famous essay about unstructured groups. They aren't actually free of hierarchy and structure, it's just informal.

https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

From what I've seen of the Precious Plastic project and its offshoots over the years (mostly from afar, though), I think would find quite a few people asking similar questions and having intense discussions about such subjects there. ;-)

I’ll call you cynical and say your entire first paragraph about organisations being right wing is total and utter tripe. And the rest of your diatribe doesn’t improve on it.

I don’t really want to follow through the rest of your thesis.

I've been a "shipper," all my adult life.

It's always been my job to Make Things Happen, as opposed to "Make Things Look Like They're Happening."

A lot of "Making Things Happen" is boring and un-sexy, but absolutely crucial.

I'm always surprised, when I run into folks that are awesome at schmoozing and getting folks to come to the party (I'm not so good at that stuff), and may be extremely creative and talented, but lack the follow-through, to make their dreams a reality.

It's usually when folks like that, team up with folks like me, that magic happens. Rarely, you have it in one person.

PP has been around for over a decade and has successfully built a pretty global community as a non profit. Here's an attempt to map out that community:

https://community.preciousplastic.com/map

Health concerns are important - which is why the PP knowledgebase and PP workshops include quite a few infos about the safety aspects of different plastics and how to work with them.

The laser cutter is not necessarily a good comparison for safety considerations. By definition, a laser cutter burns the materials it cuts. With equipment that melts plastic - like injection molding machines or FDM 3D printers - burning the material just means that you did it wrong, your temperature was too high - and you will not get a useful product.

What people do on their own is another matter - but hey, that's apparently just human (see all the chainsaw heroes in safety flip flops, the people running SLA printers in their dorm room, all the soldering that goes on without a fan/filtration, ...)

I largely agree with what you say but I have my doubts about the following statement.

> If you live in a first world country the ocean plastic isn't from you

I live in Ireland and I’m not sure that’s the case for us. Plastic was collected in the recycling bins and then shipped to China for processing. I was always skeptical of the environmental soundness of shipping plastic to the other side of the planet – and the lack of transparency about what happens to the plastic waste after. I always wondered if any plastic that wasn’t PET was just dumped in a river or the sea. A few years ago, China stopped accepting plastic refuse from Western countries so the plastic was sent to other Southeast Asian countries but they also find it to be not economically viable to process. I looked into this issue before but found it hard to get solid evidence that the plastic is actually recycled. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of the plastic that is collected in the West for “recyling” ends up in the ocean, while we in the west pat ourselves on the back for doing the “right thing”.

Personally, I do my best to Reduce and Reuse rather than Recycle.

They are in many jurisdictions for a variety of products:

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

We need to increase the cost of everything to account for all externalities. This will also encourage people to invent things to reduce the cost of the externalities, win win

Rollercoaster of a comment, that one of mine.

Down voters: why not comment why not? The market is clearly failing. I count a possible solution is 50+ years as failure.

In general landfilling (in modern, properly designed landfills) should be regarded as a kind of carbon sequestration. It's actually pretty hard to be better for the environment than that.

Historically burning trash has been a net win because food scraps decompose to methane if landfilled and if used to generate electricity and/or local heat networks the trash displaced fossil fuels from the grid.

If your nation is diverting enough organic waste from household waste, and has enough low carbon generation in the grid mix then the calculus changes and you can start worrying about the fossil plastic in the mix, but the biggest impact there is to intercept the plastic early and recycle it.

Don't you contaminate the soils if you do that? Water flows everywhere...

Manufacturing would like a quicker return on investment than 1000 years. We already made the plastic, they would like to do something with it.

> We need to cut down on producing it first, recycle it second, and then bury it as deep as possible.

You mean 're-use' rather than 'recycle'?

It has always been 'reduce, reuse, recycle' but what bemuses me is how this is nigh on impossible for normal people, even those that do their recycling and say the right things about caring for the planet.

Being serious about it means an end to having a consumerist lifestyle. This can be difficult when kids are involved. Mountains of plastic are just there with kids, in everything they do. You can't take your child out of society to live as if it was two centuries ago, their friends and the parents of their friends will have this abundance of plastic, whether it is LEGO bricks or food containers. It is just unavoidable. Capitalism as we know it would collapse if we got serious about plastic.

I am quite serious about plastic, albeit by accident. On a whim I went 'whole food, plant based', which means no processed foods or animal products. One unintended consequence is that my recycling and rubbish shrunk to a fraction of what it used to be. I no longer have plastic trays, plastic bottles and what not, just a few plastic bags, a few tins, a few glass jars and a modest amount of paper.

If I am lucky enough to get a good plastic container, I really will upcycle it.

If I meet up with relatives that live the middle class life, then, vegetable peelings aside, they will create more waste in a weekend than I will create in approximately four months.

I enjoy not having the cognitive dissonance that goes on with buying single use plastic containers whilst knowing that nothing really gets recycled. I am also 'beginner level' when it comes to the art of being 'zero waste', there are those that create no more than a small jar full of plastic in a year.

My relatives genuinely believe they are doing their bit by putting lots of plastic in the recycling, and they would frown upon someone that did not follow their example. They live in a very different consumerist world to me. But, if everyone lived like me, there would not be a lot of the economy left!

People are deeply wedded to their single use plastics. Realistically, cutting down on plastic means an end to the plastic foods that most people enjoy eating, whether that be ready meals, take outs, animal products, produce from far-flung parts of the world and sugary beverages.

A century ago, nobody had anything plastic. Given our consumerist ways, you wonder how people lived back then, when most domestic waste consisted of ash from fireplaces.

A ban on single use plastics is what we need, not any Band Aid recycling solutions. You never see LEGO bricks or anything valuable in the plastic recycling stream, all of it is single use plastics. But a ban on single use plastics would mean people paying for a lot of glass, steel and waxed paper. This comes with problems of its own.

Imagine you are driving a truck load of yoghurts from Italy, over the Alps, through France and to the UK so that middle class people can buy them. If those yoghurts have to be in glass jars then the diesel bill for this important middle class delivery will rise considerably, due to the extra weight of the glass. More CO2 would be emitted getting these vital yoghurts from industrial unit to toilet bowl.

Not buying the yoghurts is not an option as the mind-numbingly boring job of driving the truck hundreds of miles is considered gainful employment. Therefore, 'reduce' is not really an option, so that means 'recycle' or landfill. Anecdotally, as in my instance, 'reduce' is definitely possible and definitely the way to go, but, given how most people live, it is a total non-starter, mostly because it would require dietary changes.

There would be serious logistical issues with this. Drive by the nearest refinery and see the cracking tower. Essentially this is doing as you describe, making ethylene, propylene etc from olefins. But these refineries are located at pretty centralized petroleum or gas terminals. Compared to the mass flow of used plastics distributed evenly across the population density. You either need the haul the stuff very long distances or build lots of huge refineries everywhere. An incinerator is a significantly smaller capital investment than a refinery.

If you'll re-read my comment, you'll see that the lack of financial sustainability was only one of many significant criticisms.

The strongest is simply that the machines/educational materials they produce are simply not practical, useful, or accessible. It's, as many other comments have said, performative.

Conversely, there's plenty of great and little-known organizations around the world who HAVE built productive, sustainable organizations around small-scale recycling - by designing their own devices.

Moreover, as many other comments have pointed out, there's never been any accountability (again, not just in a financial sense. Though, the figures are also quite murky, such that you're citing numbers that are far too low). There's no plan other than "give us more money and THEN we'll put in some effort to come up with and share a new plan". These are not serious people.

Theyre seemingly decent and nice enough, but do not merit further support - let alone celebration. There's plenty of others in the world who are far more deserving of help, but don't have the cool marketing platform that PP does.

They seem at best perforative in their efforts as the original comment points out. Surely there is a middle ground where one can concede a company is poorly run and unprofitable, and that those two things often tie together

>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

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.

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I can't speak for your locale, but in the US, most "plastic recycling" is a myth, as very little of it is truly reusable. Trash companies basically resell what they collect, and if they can't, it ends up in the same landfills as the trash bin contents.

A lot of comments here seem to assume that the goal of PP is to provide a complete solution for the plastic waste problem. It's not and it doesn't have to be. I may be off base a bit but I think the amount of plastic that is actually being recycled is only around 10% on average (with substantial spikes in both directions if you look at it on a country basis). So there is more than enough headroom to do something useful with the stuff that would otherwise have been burned or buried.

I kind of sort of agree with your points about the manual machines but Aliexpress was not as prevalent as it it is now 10 years ago and it's not as if there were already lots of open source blueprints for injection molders, extrusion machines and the like (unlike for example in the 3D printing space), so the knowledge built up and shared by PP is still useful.

I guess it's also a pretty human thing to want to tinker with making your own machines and share them (if not, there also would not be a bajillion static site generators, notes apps and whatnot in the software world).

I don't really agree about your points about the industrial injection molding machines, though. Sure, if you want to produce many of the same parts, that's ultimately the way to go. However, if you want to do small-series stuff, experiment with different ways of making molds, do educational hands-on stuff and so on - which is what PP is much more about than maximizing output - a manual machine is much more appropriate.

Anecdote: I regularly had people from (university) departments who have all sorts of professional injection moulding equipment use our - in comparison ridiculously primitive - setups. Because it was much easier, much faster and the "vibe" in a Precious Plastics lab is usually also very different than in a research lab (and that's also not to be underestimated if it's more about development/experiments/learning than about maximizing output).

Also: Fucking around with old hydraulics can be a rather dangerous activity and requires some safety considerations not relevant in manual machines.

> 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

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

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

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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.

Am thinking propane tanks.

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.

The one below is $495, and to my untrained eye this looks more solid than Precious's DIY machines.

https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Plastic-Crusher-Equip...

All of this plastic should be shoveled into a plasma gasifier. This performance art is just a grift. Recycling it results in suboptimal downstream products, landfilling it allows for future mismanagement (methane emissions, groundwater contamination). Gasification is cleaner than incineration, and you can burn the syn gas produced to recover some energy for cogeneration. Resulting slag produced is inert and can be safely landfilled.