Precious Plastic 10th Anniversary

An organisation I've been following (and wishing I could emulate, or at least start an affiliate here) for what seems like ten years - has turned ten as of yesterday. In fact, now that I look back, I was following them from nine or eight years ago. 

That organisation is Precious Plastic, and you've often heard me refer to them by that name, or PreshPlast, or PP. The reason I appear to be late in posting this is the tyranny of time zones, while it's 22 Oct to me it's just past midnight and the start of 21 Oct as our time zone is GMT+10 here normally and GMT+11 during daylight (boo! hiss!) saving which is now on for us here. 

Dave Hakkens, founder, Kat, Mattia, and a few other PreshPlasters have been around from the beginning. Dave conceived it as a graduation project I think. Look - I'll link the video they made here. Just promise to come back to here in 26 minutes okay?

Welcome Back!

So now you have their backstory. This is their website, where you can now find all manner of recycling related, PreshPlast-related, and useful information. So you can build their machines because the plans are available. They have a Community forum on there so you can join in and chat and get involved. They have a Marketplace where you can buy ready-made machines, and their Youtube channel that you'll have already found and subscribed to if you watched. 

I'm not sure if the video mentions it but Dave's first project before PP was some kind of mobile phone which was modular and replaceable part by part. But luckily for us, he went on to do the PP thing instead. 

I definitely wanted to do this but you still need money to make the big V3 and V4 machines. You need physical mobility. And you need sponsors. I had none of those things because I was pensioned with disability almost a decade before PP was even a glint in Dave's eye. 

The Corner

For me, I turned the corner in 202... - 2020 or 2021 I think - when I bought Brucely the Ender3 Pro 3D printer. (See the note down the end of this article for the Story of Bruce. Since this has become a nostalgia article now...)

I realised that while I can't build a $10,000 V4 shredder or sheetpress, I can still innovate a bit. While I don't have a lathe to turn manually-recycled bottletops into fine pens, I can still do some small, inexpensive, but basically effective things. These are things you too can do right now and I'll put together an article or three in the future with the titles beginning with "PlastiHack #...:" and a description so you can find them. Please be a bit patient as I'm backlogged by real life demands that are currently hectic for a pensioner that can't even afford to hire someone to help (part of the issue is house/workshop/rental related things moving and changing and the landlord having had issues themselves, most is down to me not being able to physically keep up the sustained burn of energy this is going to require, two months with a worker, six to ten months without) and also some personal reasons. 

Dave's Corner

Dave Hakkens also turned a corner of his own. At one point the brunt of the PreshPlast expansion was going to be borne by another organisation, One Army. 

Dave and the PreshPlast crew spawned this to do other recycling / ecofriendly / sustainable / etc work. Rather than confining itself to PP, One Army also provided the launching of Project Kamp. 

That's a little plot of land in Portugal which is where you can find Dave right now, and which the Army (I think?) bought in 2020 / 2021 and started looking to find ways to live sustainably and with low footprint in smaller communities. Project Kamp has its own Youtube channel where you can see some of the downright amazing things they've done with majority recycled materials, local food, etc. 

All in all, the guy at the centre of it all has literally moved mountains. There are thousands, if not tens of thousand perhaps by now, of organisations and projects under the Precious Plastic umbrella. There are another group of thousands that don't declare themselves affiliated with PP but whose founders got their inspiration from the suite of websites. And who knopws how many millions have watched a random video from them, and then another, and another, and another...

That's A Lot To Accomplish In A Decade

Anyway - to that Note:

NOTE: Brucely Printer

Okay so I know I posted this somewhere but I can't find where. So you lucky people get the story again... 

When I wanted a 3D printer to make new devices and parts for recycling machines, I had some money saved from survey filling work, Banggood were having a birthday discounts sale, Creality had knocked a few more percent off their Ender3 series, and in the end I got Brucely for the princely sum of $240 delivered. Some things immediately caught my attention. 

Creality is a company based in China. The logo for the Ender printer series is a dragon, a creature that features large in Chinese lore. I also read that the name "Ender" came from the Ender dragon in Minecraft. My printer was named after Ender The Dragon. It was now in Australia, so by default, an Aussie. A little light began blinking annoyingly above my head. What was the name that Monty Python based an entire sketch around? And who starred in a movie called "Enter The Dragon?" 

Bruce. The Bruces sketch. Aussie. Bruce Lee. Brucely. (Which was, for a time, apparently synonymous with "manly" according to legend.)

Okay - I've infected your mind with the Brucely virus. 

Dave got where he is now due to a few volunteers and sponsors. I'm going to ask you to volunteer - by sharin' the hell outta me posts, mate! Fair crack o' the whip ay? Because every share will let others read my posts, and they'll share, and I'll start getting an audience that will raise awareness of all the stuff I write about, several articles a week, and I really hope you too think my messages are worth being seen by more people.

What "messages?" There's a newspaper in the graphic above - it'll take you to Ted's News Stand where you can always see my latest posts across all my blogs. There's also at least one link on that page that'll allow you to subscribe to my newsletter. I recommend it. Share the hell outta that link too please. I'd really appreciate it.

And lastly, the dreaded donation. The coffee mug will take you to Ko-Fi dot com where you can make a one-time donation of the price of a cuppa, or - preferably - a monthly one. I want to not have to pay the cost of the server fees, the domain name fees, the subscriptions to news resources. I'd like to not pay for research materials for the projects I'm trying to get off the ground, for someone to help with the foregone moving of the old workshop, upcoming move of that workshop and shed again, to defray the costs of moving the experimental urban worm garden that I've now had to hire people to help with twice due to circumstances beyond my control, and to make possible a bit faster development cycle because I won't have to constantly wait until I can shake a few bucks out of my pension to buy material just to develop another device or technique for recycling.