Turning plastic waste into real products with this simple machine

This is the story of how we turned a machine that is usually super expensive into one that you can build yourself. Making it available for people all around the world to turn plastic waste into new things. Okay let's start at the beginning. One of the most common ways that all the plastic products around us are made is made with injection molding. Everything from bottle caps to toys, electronics and kitchen utensils. But not many people have access to the machines that make those things, as these machines are very advanced and cost the same as a house. And it makes sense the machines are expensive, because they can produce a new cheap product in less than 30 seconds. But because of that, if you own a machine that expensive, you don't really want to use recycled plastics, as the materials can be mixed or dirty, so they might damage your machine or slow down your production. And that's the problem. we have this plastic material in the world that technically can be recycled but almost no one can actually do it because they don't have the machine for it creating a big mess we set out with the goal to give people access to a recycling machine but we don't want to end up with a 100k machine so we had to change something and we found a way by changing time okay let me explain see making a new plastic product every 30 seconds feels normal because that's what the big industry has optimized for over the last 50 years But it's actually a very short amount of time and this is very easy to see when you compare it with other materials. A small wooden furniture can take days to make. Or a ceramic cup spends hours in a kiln before it's finished. Nobody expects these materials to be produced in seconds. So why does plastic needs to be produced in such a short amount of time? Because it's disposable? Cheap? For us, plastic is a very unique material and it should be valued like that. Hence our name, Precious Plastic. This mindset to change production time gave us the freedom we need. Production doesn't need to be fast, optimized, fancy or expensive. Just well made, easy and accessible. And with this concept in mind, we started developing the machine. Injection molding is basically heating shredded plastic until it melts and then use pressure to force it into a mold where it cools down into its final shape. And we tried to achieve this as simple as possible. This meant removing things. No hydraulics or motors, but a manual press where all the force comes from a long lever. It's slower than industrial equipment but it removes a huge amount of complexity and makes the machine much easier to build and maintain. And on top of this we designed the machine in a way to use only materials that you find basically anywhere around the world. Lots of parts are standard steel pipes and plumbing components like nozzles and connectors, much less specialized parts. So at this point we have a machine and we could put plastic in, heat it up, melt it and then press it out. Next question is what do you do with this poop of plastic? See, the machine is just one part of the challenge, the other one is the molds. The mold has a big impact on many things. How detailed the product can be, how easy it is to manufacture, how much it will cost, and most important, what kind of product you will actually make. In the industry, molds easily cost tens of thousands of euro and are very advanced tools to make. Not everyone has access to that. We had to find a new, creative and low-budget way to make molds. They need to be strong to take the pressure, but also easily cool down with a lot of hot plastic inside. And most importantly, accessible for others around the world. So after a lot of failures and experiments, we found a few good techniques. We found that turning aluminum molds on a lathe worked pretty well for symmetrical objects. And you can get much more detail and smooth finishes, like spinning toys or doorknob handles. Welded steel molds were strong and pretty cheap to fabricate anywhere in the world. But the shapes are pretty basic, as it's limited to what you can do with welding. One pretty cool new method we developed was casting aluminum molds from aluminum trash. The material is pretty much for free and you just need a rocket stove to melt it and a mold from sand. Quite a low-tech method and what's interesting is that you can copy an existing product and this allows it to produce unique textures you rarely see in plastic. It almost doesn't look like a plastic product when it comes out. So you can make a whole range of funky organic shapes with texture on it. And finally we knew CNC machine molds would produce the cleanest and most detailed results as the industry uses this. It was a big investment but we needed to give it a try so we machined a mold for a phone case. It's much more controlled and you can calculate much better how the material will flow as it's made exactly like the 3D model. And the hard part was that it really had to snap on the phone but not too tight. A lot of precision was needed. This was by far the most complicated mold we had attempted until now. So now we have a few good mold techniques plus a machine to work with and all this information like the 3D models and blueprints of the machine plus step-by-step tutorial videos on how to build the machine but also how to make the molds. A lot of work went into making all of this and now comes the most exciting part. Sharing it all open source online for free, so everyone in the world can use it. But before we do, I want to thank the precious plastic supporters. Because of them we can develop and share this information for free, with the goal that people around the world can turn their plastic waste into new valuable objects. If you think this is useful, consider to join us and become a member for 7 euro a month. We will keep you updated each month with the progress we made and share a financial report so you can see exactly how your money is spent and cancel anytime. Now if you want to see the impact it had to share these drawings open source let's have a look. The cool thing about this machine is that it's designed to be simple and made with easily accessible parts so it quickly got replicated around the world. In the beginning the actual products were still pretty basic. People in the community were figuring out both the machine and the molding part. It was really nice to see people be able to turn their plastic waste into new products that they could sell. In reality it resulted into many small products like keychains and souvenirs. Nice that it was made from plastic waste, but lots of useless things to be honest. And although most of it looked useless on the surface, many actually made big steps underneath. Like for instance this was a little keychain to store small things waterproof. I remember being amazed by it the first time I saw it. I mean it's just a keychain, but for the movement it was a new CNC mold that was the thinnest product made so far and had a thread on it to screw a bottle cap. Pretty epic. Overall I was still very early stages and it was more about finding the best process instead of the best product. But the next thing really kicked the quality forward. Around the same time desktop CNC machines also became much more affordable and more open source models got released. This enabled much better and more detailed molds community-wide. In a short time, this became the new standard for making molds. And as the molds improved, so did the products. People could now make much more round molds, allowing products to be more organic. Or easily add engravings in their mold. Like these tiny letters here come out very detailed. And without extra hassle when you need to produce a bunch, like for a Jenga tower. It became easier to make multiple items in one mold, making it much more efficient to produce in bulk while keeping it high quality to sell. And molds could make smaller items more detailed, also consistent in volume to make smaller items like jewelry. The precision got really deep to a more engineering level, like adding thread or making sure stuff really fits All of this allowed people to make much more useful products that go beyond the keychain, but products that can actually replace new plastic. To be fair, it's not easy to find these useful applications, but here are a few cool examples. An electrical socket, very boring but everyone uses it. Always made from new plastic, could be made from plastic waste. Or pens to write, we all use them. In Australia they made a mold so they can be injected and we don't need to use new plastic. Or a clothespin, often made from new plastic, or a mix of wood and metal. This design from a workspace in Germany removes the metal and makes it from one material. Easier to recycle in the future. Or this advanced buckle mold, made in South Korea. The level of detail is very good. Pretty hard to make sure that things actually click well. And that's why they're often made with new plastic. But here you go, works with recycled as well. Knife handles, often made from new plastic, can be made from recycled plastic. Some guys in UK are producing and selling them in many different colors and variations. In Iceland they made a mold to produce spoons. To be fair it's actually much harder to use recycled plastic for food safe items. I'm sure not always sure where the material comes from. But some stuff just really has no reason to be new plastic. Like this thing you find in supermarkets, we all know them, can be made from recycled plastic. Preventing to produce new plastic and meanwhile also reducing waste that's already there is pretty awesome. But turns out this new way of working can actually give much more cool advantages. Like these guys from Spain developed a mold for sunglasses and built an entire workshop around it that can move. So people enter and they can choose their own colors, inject the plastic into the mold, assemble it and walk away with a unique custom-made pair of sunglasses. Making it different each time and done on demand under 30 minutes. The big industrial machines we saw before are very advanced but producing something on location, on demand, with custom colors is something those guys are not even able to do. And while the community explored new products they also kept improving the machine itself. Like those guys of the sunglasses, they needed more pressure, as with our machine it's sometimes a little bit hard. So they used another mechanism with a wheel to apply more pressure, which became quite a widely adopted technique. Some made them bigger so they can inject bigger things, others made a movable version, and quite some people made it even smaller as a desktop version. Others made it more advanced and started to automate the pressing process, making it much easier to make large productions. And some went the other way and made it even more basic, making them work without electricity, but having plastic melted by the sun. Although they all look different, the principle never really changed. You heat the plastic, push it into a mold and wait for it to cool. Nowadays a whole ecosystem of machine builders is set up around it. New companies are established around building and selling small scale injection machines. And honestly, by now many of these machines are much better than our original design. Safer, faster, certified, more advanced and easier to work with. They got better, but also more expensive and complex. So actually it's hard to say which one is better. It depends a lot where you are in the world. A remote area in Africa has completely different needs than a European city. So where originally there was only this super expensive machine, only available for a few, you now have just not one machine, but a whole range of machines. So you can select one that fits your needs. And you can actually find them all on the bazaar in case you're interested. The link is in the description below. Nowadays there are hundreds of recycling workspaces around the world in over 60 countries. All injecting plastic waste into new products. It became a whole new profession, small scale recycling. All because we shared some files for free. Now to be fair, I have a hard time believing this is all on us. To me it sounds so logical to turn your plastic waste into something valuable that someone else will figure it out along the way anyway. But sharing it open source is what accelerated everything and gave people in every corner of the world access to the machine. And this is important because globally still less than 10% of all our plastic gets recycled. And this is why our precious plastic members are so important. They allow us to continue to develop new solutions. And this video is about an injector, but we also made a sheet press and an entire recycling workspace in a shipping container. All shared open source online for free. And exactly that is what makes our membership unique. Your support just doesn't help one organization, it scales. It enables people around the world to use this knowledge for free, making it easier to recycle plastic. Visit PreciousPlastic.com and sign up in less than a minute.