Hi all,
I couldn’t sleep last night thinking about how we could realise the Precious Plastic v3 in the UK and I want to see first how many people would be interested in helping! 
Let’s say there’s around 100 people who expressed interest and are in the Precious Plastic map in the UK, that’s not too bad.
I’ll start thinking about writing a business plan, but the general idea that I got is:
Concept: To build and run a mobile workshop (in a shipping container similar to PP or why not in a double decker, to make it more british), with shredders, filament maker, extruder, injection moulding machines and also a 3d printer. An area to collect, sort and wash plastics and an area to sell products. The mobile workshop would spend 1-2 months in a place and move to another city or part of the country. It would interest environmentalists (recycle plastic yourself and create products), beach cleaners (#2minuteBeachClean), makers and artists (make a product yourself, sell it, featured artists), kids and general public (offering tours of the microfactory, talks, school trips), local councils (we’d employ local people), etc. I envision it as being a hybrid between for- and not-for-profit, what I call not-only-for-profit. We may or may not be profitable, we’d pay everyone working for us minimum wage, being the environmental and social impact the most important value over the money. At the same time we’d rely on donations and volunteers.
Finance: I’ll make a budget for the startup costs, let’s say it’s between £10-15k, that’s not a lot, very manageable. We can crowdfund it, find investors, ask suppliers for discounts in exchange of promotion, get a loan, ask recycling NGOs for funding, there must also be some startup credits by the government or the EU, if we make a good case for how much social and environmental value there’s here I think we can do it
For the running costs, we can crowdfund it via patreon or regular donations, ask the local council where the workspace is going to be located for the time being (say one month we bring it to London, another month to Brighton, another month to Bristol, etc. In each place, request to the local council a space to park the container/bus, access to water/electricity which they pay, and also £1-2k for the month, which will be directly spent on wages for local people who’d be working on the workspace, so it’s a reinvestment in their own city), and also would be funded by sales of the products made from plastic.
My contribution: I’m really exciting about starting this up! I’m an engineer and I build machines so I control the technical aspect. I’m creative at coming up with technical ideas and how to make this concept possible and I could find partnerships and funding options, pitch, business plan… However I don’t know what products to make or how to make cool things that sell well, so I need some artists on board and people who understands money, if that makes sense. Someone to run it, organize where the workshop is touring and someone to physically work on it. All these could be done by a couple of people on a payroll or many people volunteering a couple of hours a week.
Anyway, for now that’s my idea, let me know what you think
For now let’s see who’d be interested in taking part, in any way, so: calling all UK PP community members!
Cheers!
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