Hey world
This is a heavy message to send, but essential for the future of Precious Plastic. It will either make it or not. In this post I’ll give a detailed overview of all the current problems we have, how it got to this point and whats next. A short summarised video is below. No need to watch, it's all in the text.
Our last big development
Lets start with our last big development. 2020, when we released Version 4, this was our latest release. We worked about 1,5 year with over +100 people from around the world. We developed the first ‘Pro’ Machines, a Sheetpress, Starterkits, Business calculators, new moulds, products and more. Looking back this was quite a unique moment. A lot of passionate work was done by volunteers and everything was shared Open Source online for free. Here some of the things we made
With a relatively small amount of money, we reached a global impact in 2023 of over 1100 organzations in 56 countries, who recycled 1.400.000KG Plastic, they generated together a revenue of +$3.7 Million, employed 530 people, works with 3.405 volunteers and built 1.175 machines. (And this is only from the workspaces who shared their data last year) Learn more about our impact here.
☝️This was the good part. Lets get into our problems
How we work
In order to understand our problems it’s important to know how Precious Plastic is developed since its unusual. We work in what we call Versions. Version 1 got released in 2013 and the latest one 4 years ago. The principle is, we develop a lot of new things, share them online for free. And then whoever was involved takes a holiday or goes off to something else. They really have to go because at that point we spend all our money. The workspace is empty, the work drops, nothing new is made, we wait. Up until now for some magical reason we always received a gift to continue moving forward. From winning awards, to getting a big workspace donated. Whenever we got enough resources we assembled a team and started developing again.. Each time the team and amount of work grew. Until the latest version, here the problems started.
When the Problems started
We worked in versions not because we wanted to, but because we had to. We share everything online for free because we believe recycling knowledge should be available for everyone. As a consequence we don’t generate enough income to pay a team all year around. But after Version 4 a small group of seven dedicated ambitious volunteers wanted to try and sustain Precious Plastic all year around. So we can continue development and have a bigger impact to reduce plastic waste. This by itself is a hard job but we also had some extra problems on the way
#1 No workspace
The team was ready to continue work. But just a few weeks later Covid-19 came to the world, but this wasn’t our main problem. Our problem was Chrome-6, a chemical the municipality found in the paint from the building that was applied 40 years ago. Which meant we had to leave the workspace fast, and the building was large, we had a lot of machines and items to sell, in a short amount of time, during lockdowns. This meant we had to sell many things below value since that period most people were looking to buy bread machines, not robot arms. After the exhausting/rushed job of leaving our workspace we could stay in the garage/shed in the house of one of the team members in France. It was nice we had a base to continue, but it was much smaller and temporary. It was quite a downgrade.
#2 No business model
One of the main goals of this small team was trying to find a business model that would serve Precious Plastic’s mission, bring income to sustain a team and not compete with the rest of the community. The last one is difficult, because our most logical and common model would be to sell machines and moulds. There are not many Open Source Hardware projects like Precious Plastic in the world. And the ones that exist mostly sell their products. Arduino sells their circuit boards, Prusa sells 3d printers. However in our case we’re also building a global network of machine builders that can provide local recycling equipment. We didn't want to compete with our own community.
The plan was to do Projects or as we called them, Collabs. It meant to help others set up their projects. Sort of a consultancy. The team setup quite a few cool projects, from a refugee camp in a desert in Algeria to a big Sheetpress in Nigeria. And meanwhile released a few new machine drawings. The model somewhat worked, we continued development and could do meaningful work. However it was financially always tight and often didn’t bring in enough money to sustain the team (that was getting paid minimum Dutch wage). But what really broke it was the next problem
#3 Lawsuit
As the team was setting up projects we worked with different clients around the world. Working for clients was completely new for us and we're learning along the way. And one of the first projects we setup was in Manhattan, New York for a cosmetic company to recycle their packaging. We helped to set it up, got machines from a community member and local people ran it. 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? We analysed it and are convinced that we are not to blame. But we do not know what a judge is going to say. Meanwhile this has been going on for the last 2 years. Lots of paperwork and documents need to be filed with lawyers that charge up to $600/h, sending emails got painful. Being in a lawsuit in New York is very costly. On top of that we didn't have insurance, meaning we have to pay for it from our own tiny pockets.
#4 Software, heavily underestimated
During Version 4 we started developing our own Community Platform. It’s software that is the digital home of our community that helps members to document, share knowledge and find others to collaborate with. It’s developed in collaboration with our other projects and there is a lot more information about it here. Anyway this has been a massive project and the original complexity of it was underestimated. Took waaay more effort than we thought. In the recent years we’ve been hard at work to catch up and the platform got much more mature with many more features. But realistically this has been a hit on our online community since the ‘digital home’ wasn’t good enough to host everyone. We invested a lot in this so far and will continue to be a big project so please use the platform, give feedback so we can improve it and help us code it.
#5 Open Source community
At Precious Plastic we want to enable more people to recycle plastic. Plastic waste is a big global problem and needs many people collaborating in every corner of the world to fix it. That's why we give everything Open Source for free so everyone has access. On top of that a big part of Version 4 was to make sure that the people that start recycling workspaces can financially sustain themselves. Because If they can continue to recycle on a daily basis it means less plastic waste. We want all those hard working workspaces to succeed and provide business plans, calculators and instruction to help them. A few years later this resulted in hundreds of workspaces around the world that started a business who manage to recycle on a daily basis, which is great.
We went all-in on giving. And believe(d?) that sharing Open Source will bring contributions back one way or another. Contributions to support the Precious Plastic Community can be made in various ways. From a financial donation once a recycle-business is profitable, to giving credit or sharing back their knowledge. And many members do contribute something back which is great. However we’ve also been observing quite some established organisations that take more than they give, building business around Precious Plastic but not contributing anything back. It’s allowed, since it’s all Open-Source. But the mentality of only taking things and not contributing will eventually kill a community-driven project like this.
#6 It is bad designed
We don’t blame those for not contributing enough back. We see this as a fault on us. The project wasn’t designed to have a healthy financial model and relation with the community. We were always fully focussed on giving to the community, not us being a financially sustainable organisation. Funny example of this is the recent PPOSF (Precious Plastic Open Source Fund). We received a €100K donation. Which was amazing, but we decided to give it all to the community so they can continue developing their projects. Not to sustain the organisation itself. You could see this as a humble move from us, give it to the community. But it isn’t, it’s ineffective, because now we have to bother you with our problems. Ideally we don’t have to do this and you don’t have to worry about us.
#7 No long term team
As you can imagine all of the above problems make it hard for a team member to have a long term perspective in Precious Plastic. Even though the team has been very small, effective and works with many volunteers it has continued to be a struggle to pay everyone every month without worrying. Over time this brings lots of stress and uncertainty, especially if the team members by themselves grow up and need more stability in life.
Our current setup
Precious Plastic is a non-profit for public good (ANBI) setup in the Netherlands.
So what does our team and community look like? Here is a funny way to look at it:
Precious Plastic Community
⬥+ 1000 workspaces around the world
⬥530 people employed, 3000 volunteers
⬥Totalling + $3.7 Million Revenue last year
Precious Plastic Organisation
⬥3 full-time people in the team
⬥Quarterly running costs €30K
⬥6 Months before out of money
⬥No workspace. Everyone is fully remote
As you can see not many team members to manage a large community. There are many areas we should work on but simply cannot. The team spends most of its time making sure just the basics are up and running and community members can continue to recycle and use our tools. And even with this small effective team we only have enough money to sustain for the coming 6 months. The future doesn’t look good.
What is next?
I’ve been thinking about this. What should Precious Plastic do?
1: ☠️ Let Precious Plastic Die: It build a global community of recyclers, it achieved its mission and that’s it. We learned valuable lessons and the community will probably stay online for a bit but would slowly fade away.
2: 💪 Push it to the next level: There is still lots of plastic waste around the world. We need way more people recycling and R&D on other plastic types. The community needs to grow.
To be honest I personally could be at peace with both of these directions. It’s amazing what Precious Plastic developed with a relatively small budget and passionate people volunteering their time. Many lessons learned. But an Open Source project like this needs many people caring for it in order to stay alive. If there isn't a large supportive community it will naturally die. It goes beyond the power of an individual.
That said, what many people might not realise, is that we would waste an unused potential we can currently unlock. We spend years building a global community of recyclers. Rolling out new improved tools has a much higher impact than before, we can reach the right people in many areas in the world. Plus we have clear visibility on our problems and are after all these years very close to having a healthy organisational cycle, see the chart below. All of this makes me think about giving it one last push to finish it. Version 5.
What is Version 5?
We have many ideas for a Version 5 and would love to work on this. But as you can see from this long text (thanks for reading all the way) we are in a big dip and have some big problems. Whatever we need to develop to get out of this needs to serve the community + the organisation itself. It will be made in a way that it can financially sustain itself afterwards. Something we never took into account. It will mean rebuilding things from the ground up, which requires much more help and resources than before. It would be the biggest thing we ever made as you can see below in the graph. Our team is small, our community is large. We can only do this if people like you are willing to support and help out.
How can you help?
The first step is gathering support from the community. If not ones cares about Precious Plastic there is no reason for us to continue to work on it. You can do this by "showing your support". Next we need to find resources to develop the next phase of the project, so you can help us "raise funds for V5".
If enough action is taken we can move forward and will share a more detailed plan for Version 5.
If not, we are willing to accept that the project will just die.
We will keep you posted with updates.
Thank you community
Dave
*It’s a complex problem to explain spanned over multiple years. If there are ideas, questions or comments go here
