Precious Plastic Is in Trouble

Summary

Precious Plasticis in troubleHey worldThis 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.‍VIDEOOur last big development‍Lets 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 madeWith 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 workIn 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 t...