Precious Plastic Commons #33
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Greetings, I figured id get the ball rolling with some ice breaker questions after poking around your website a bit. I do still have a bit of votes left in my wallet as well. I noticed that you are using a '.com' website, which implies that Precious Plastics is (or was at some point) intended to be a commercial venture. I'll try to frame my questions with this in mind but feel free to clarify and answer differently if its appropriate.
Cheers and good luck! You are off to a great start! |
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Hi @graial, Thank you very much for your thoughtful questions!
To begin I will clarify that Precious Plastic has never been a commercial project in spite of the .com website extension. Precious Plastic has been around for 10 years (was started as a graduation design project of Dave Hakkens in 2012), and for the first 6, it had no formal organizational entity and was supported through Patreon, individual donations, and a small grant or award every so often. In 2018, there was formerly a non-profit entity setup to house all of Dave Hakkens projects, and currently we are in the process of setting up a subsidiary entity to house only the Precious Plastic operations. Since mid 2020, myself and a small team have created a value creation model called collabs (can explore more about that here) that has created a larger revenue source which we now primarily use to support our operations. Essentially we offer a combination of goods (our open source recycling machines that we get produced from our community) and services (training on how to use them to create products) to organizations around the world that want to launch small scale recycling projects using the precious plastic model. After we implement these collabs, we reinvest the profits into supporting our open source ecosystem. To create this model, we took a lot of inspiration from Arduino - they publish their technology open source and then leverage their expertise to create commercial partnerships with bigger, paying organizations. This value model works OK to achieve our goal, which is to continue to support and develop technology and a community surrounding ending plastic waste, but to be honest is heavily subsidized by low wages and precarious positions of the team members who do it because it is a labor of love and mission. We are actively pursuing tokenization because we believe it can be a more direct, powerful value feedback loop for maintaining and growing the core open source technology and platforms of precious plastic, and could essentially remove the need for any "commercial like" activities. Ok now on to the free-rider part of the question! Open source is a sort of catch 22 with a social impact project like Precious Plastic. Open source is essential to our impact strategy , as we want to get as many people recycling plastic waste as possible, building businesses or nonprofits with our technology as the backbone of their operations. This strategy has worked, and hundreds of organizations and thousands of individuals are currently using our machines, techniques, and knowledge. However, in spite of this being a good thing, these organizations are free riders. They are continuing to develop the techniques and technology (improved machines, new products), creating in some cases millions of dollars of value. But in spite of this value creation due to the open source commons, the new value created (whether financial or intellectual property) is not flowing back into developing and maintaining the commons. To make an analogy to open source software, many times companies like Uber fork open source packages, make them better and then do not share the improvements. This behavior hinders the development of the underlying technology for everyone. However this behavior is due to the design flaw of the commons - it needs to be “owned” and managed by its community. At the end of the day someone has to pay to maintain and develop public goods, and ideally those benefiting/using them should be intrinsically aligned with managing and contributing back value. While this problem is happening in Precious Plastic is not from corporate giants (although a few times it has), the pattern is the same. It's people and organizations using a public good and then privatizing the gains. This is not a sustainable model, and we believe tokenization creates a radical new opportunity to design for the free rider problem in Precious Plastic in particular and open source in general. If one or more tokens is introduced, we believe we can align the individual people and organizations in our community with the collective goal of ending plastic waste. At the high level, we believe if our community held tokens that grew in value as the value of the commons grew, and could govern the decisions that determine the maintenance and development of the commons, they would take care of the commons. That means sharing back new machine/product designs, using the digital platforms to share information and support one another, and conducting business on the ecosystem’s marketplace. It would also help adjust a sense of the organizations in the community competing with one another to collaborating.
We definitely do compete with virgin plastic and we have many other challenges due to focusing on small-scale recycling, as most recycling and mass production techniques are done on a large, centralized scale. There are many facets to the plastic waste problem. The benefit of open source and having a big community is that these are essentially thousands of experiments, each trying something different. Our core team has traditionally “watched” what works or is demanded by the community and then designs a version of a machine, product, or process into the core release. So while it has always been a centralized decision making process for the core releases, it's informed by the community. There are many things that did or didn’t work, but I will point out one thing. For the first 6 or so years of the project, it was mostly DIY people and educators that were really using Precious Plastic technology. 2018-200 we developed Precious Plastic version 4 which focused on creating a set of “semi-industrial” machines, which incorporated what was working for the small businesses around the community (people actually processing a significant amount of plastic waste into new products) and created a full release of new machines/products around empowering these models. This worked and we see many more examples of small product producers around the community in addition to the educators and DIY people.
Thanks for noticing this! We want to create as transparent an ecosystem as possible. We hope this metric would increase substantially with the token backed commons. One problem we experience with this Bazar platform is “leaking”, where sellers take the transaction off the platform to avoid the fee. If these sellers had a sense of “ownership” and governance over the tool and platform they are using to sell their machine/products, we believe this would incentivize them to keep it on the platform. We would see the transaction fee from the bazar going to a community treasury. I would estimate that our marketplace only captures 5% of the total transactions currently going on in the Precious Plastic world, and with a token back commons that incentivizes this number to increase, I would estimate a significant increase in sales going through the platform. Probably millions of euros/dollars per year. |
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Adding to the conversation I would say that (probably) Precious Plastic greatest achievement has been to translate complex recycling and engineering concepts into understandable, bites-size knowledge that could easily be endorsed by everyone. I could see a parallel with crypto and DAOs where the general public is kinda lost. It's complex and new. Precious Plastic could play a crucial role becoming a vector to simplify the language and concepts into simple and understandable ideas that anyone could grasp. Thanks for the opportunity, really excited to bring this to life! |
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Really like this project. But is there any measurement of a) the quantity of plastic which has been processed b) the enevironmental impact. For many eco systems completely removing plastics is extremely difficult. This is a welcome solution in the spirit of recycling component of circular economies. |
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Hi @Jose5048 ! Thanks for this question. The open source nature of this project makes it difficult to measure the impact. We have conducted one impact survey (in 2020), and you can see the results here: https://preciousplastic.com/impact We plan on conducting further impact surveys and ideally integrating impact measurements into our community platform: https://community.preciousplastic.com/ |
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Thanks @jaklatt92 and quite fantastic IMO. What I would say is these findings can be quantified into Economic Returns. And the which I suspect are high enough to warrant high Financial Returns to say Impact Bonds. This could be investigated. This has two ramifications 1) Projecting into the future you could make a case for being the most deserving nomination 2) You could attract other Impact Investors too, but what everyone wants is to be part of the Web 3 Eco System around Common Stack. |
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@Jose5048 also bear in mind that those data are from 2020, or V3 of the project. Since then we've released new machines, new techniques, new digital tools, new business models and much more. So I'd say the impact, to stay on the lower end, is 5x what you see on the impact survey page. Internally we are aware if the injustice those numbers give to the project :( and that's why we're working to implement (as @jaklatt92 mentioned) impact gathering strategies built-in within our own tools to gather live data about the community so we can have a snapshot at any time of the impact we're all having as a project and common. These data could be a mix of on-chain and off-chain. Not fully sure what impact bonds are but would be keen to learn more and explore opportunities. Anything that could take us closer to a world without plastic waste. |
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How might a keen community in the Philippines (for example 🤓 ) take their first steps in trying to adopt/deploy your solutions? Id hope for an answer a little more sophisticated than |
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Hey @graial glad you asked 😁 Let me put my Filipino shoes (or flip-flops rather 😂). If I was in the Philippines and wanted to start a Precious Plastic project I would:
Eheh hope that was sufficient and hope it wasn't too overwhelming 😱 |
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Very cool Mattia,
Turns out the group I know who's most active in plastics recycling is
already using some of your equipment.
So regardless of how the CommonsPrie shakes out, Ill be throwing your name
around whenever plastic recycling comes up around here.
Keep up the great work guys!
…On Sat, May 28, 2022 at 11:13 PM Mattia ***@***.***> wrote:
Hey @graial <https://github.com/graial> glad you asked 😁 Let me put my
Filipino shoes (or flip-flops rather 😂).
If I was in the Philippines and wanted to start a Precious Plastic project
I would:
1. Go on the Precious Plastic map
<https://community.preciousplastic.com/map> and check which recycling
projects are already around me.
2. If there are any projects nearby I would drop them a message and go
visit them to get a better understanding of what it takes to start a
recycling project.
3. While on the bus going to visit one of the Precious Plastic
projects near me I would be digging the Precious Plastic Academy
<https://community.preciousplastic.com/academy/> to learn as much as
possible about micro recycling.
4. On the way back from visiting the project in all excitement I would
indeed check the Precious Plastic Discord
<https://discordapp.com/invite/rnx7m4t> to meet other micro recyclers
from around the world and ask a few more questions about their experience
starting a recycling project.
5. A few days later I would visit the Starterkit
<https://preciousplastic.com/archived/starterkits/overview.html> page
to really understand which type of project I should start (collecting
plastic, making machines, gathering the community or actually recycling
plastic)
6. At this point I might check the Precious Plastic Bazar
<https://bazar.preciousplastic.com/> (marketplace) to see how much it
might cost me to buy Precious Plastic machines from other micro recyclers.
7. At this point I have more clear ideas and might be ready to create
an actionplan
<https://community.preciousplastic.com/academy/business/actionplan>
(custom made business plan) to plan in details my project to avoid waste
time and money.
8. I could then use the workspace calculator
<https://community.preciousplastic.com/academy/business/workspacecalculator>
to understand the costs and revenues of running my project.
9. Now the my idea is more clear, I can go back on the map and find
people that "want to get started" near me to assemble a team
10. I would then find the appropriate space following the space
guidelines found in each starterkit
11. Build <https://community.preciousplastic.com/academy/build> or buy
<https://bazar.preciousplastic.com/> the necessary machines and tools.
12. Meanwhile I would dig a little more the academy to learn how to
create <https://community.preciousplastic.com/academy/create> things
from plastic waste
13. At the same time I would check what other micro recyclers around
the world are sharing back with the community using the How-to
<https://community.preciousplastic.com/how-to>
14. Few months have gone by and my project is up and running with an
enthusiastic and talented team.
15. Now I'd give it a few extra months to learn all the secrets to
become a micro recycling master.
16. To finish it all off I would add myself to the map, sell prods and
machines on the marketplace, and share back what I know with the community
using the How-tos.
...
17. After many years in the project I am really involved with Precious
Plastic governance. I regularly vote on proposals, help put forth new
proposals to improve Precious Plastic adding my Philippines' perspective,
earn a bunch of extra $PPC (Precious Plastic Coin) onboarding new users
with which I pay the marketplace fee back to the treasury and joined the 3
global Precious Plastic conferences earning POAPs
Eheh hope that was sufficient and hope it wasn't too overwhelming 😱
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Tell us about the community that you are nominating
Precious Plastic is an open hardware platform enabling people to start their own plastic recycling project anywhere in the world. To date the Precious Plastic community is made up of 600+ organizations worldwide and thousands of members - all recycling plastic waste into new products through Precious Plastic tools, knowledge, and platforms. Precious Plastic has been literally built by the community - for free. Every few years a group of volunteers and a small core team get together to design the next version of Precious Plastic. All versions have been developed on a volunteer basis. Each version has come with new open source machines, websites, products, and digital platforms. Only the last two years has the project been financially sustainable enough to support a small paid team.
What public goods does this community support or will they support in the future?
Precious Plastic supports a free and open source commons of open source machines, educational information, videos, pictures, business models surrounding the mission to tackle the plastic waste problem. We do this through two ways. First by recycling existing plastic waste into new, beautiful products. And secondly through changing the way that people perceive plastic - shift from viewing it as cheap and disposable to valuable and precious. We believe this will ultimately solve the plastic waste problem, so that people reduce their use of plastic in the first place.
Our commons will continue to grow and develop - better open source machines, more open source products to make with them, more educational information about recycling plastic etc.
Who are the people, DAOs and other organizations already part of this community?
Precious Plastic shared everything free and open source. This led to 600+ known organizations and tens of thousands of people around the world independently doing their part to tackle the plastic waste problem on a daily basis. You can check out all the organizations out on our map at community.preciousplastic.com/map . Our discord has over 20,000 members.
Why do you think this community needs a Commons?
Precious Plastic is already a commons, but we are witnessing a tragedy of the commons. Tens of thousands of people and organizations are using the free machines blueprints, knowledge and tools provided, but do not contribute back or maintain the underlying open source intellectual property commons. Many organizations actually do the opposite with Precious Plastic - they take the free information and technology, improve it (by designing a better recycling machine for example), but do not share the new designs back to the community to use. This is a design fallacy that needs addressing if Precious Plastic organizations are to be found in every town on this planet and truly solve the plastic waste problem.
Collective governance and incentive alignment could address the tragedy of the commons currently experienced by Precious Plastic. We dream of Precious Plastic being owned by its 600+ organizations and members around that support it. We hope shared governance and incentive alignment will drive increased contributions, organic growth and users becoming active ambassadors, and provide a sustainable funding and value feedback loop to the underlying open source intellectual property.
What other resources do you have that will make your Commons deployment a success?
Precious Plastic develops its own (open source) Community Platform software where the community interacts and shares recycling knowledge (including an academy, how-to, map and events). This software could be easily developed to implement design principles and features reflecting a regenerative commons built on game theory, tokenomics and the blockchain.
We also have a firm partnership with Five Media (https://fivemedia.com/) an impact media organization that helps us spread our message. The opportunity to become one of the first impact DAO’s focused on the commons and operating in the material world is something they would likely love to support.
Our core team is also part of a social design organization that runs two sister projects - Fixing Fashion (https://fixing.fashion/) and Project Kamp (https://projectkamp.com/). These projects can replicate what we achieve with launching a recycling commons on the blockchain with their respective commons and amplify our message around designing commons with incentive alignment.
Do you have an idea for the name of this Commons?
Precious Plastic
Submitted by [Discord handle or Twitter handle]
Discord: jaklatt#2299
Twitter: @jaklatt
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