With Version 4 coming close to an end, we felt one of the best ways to present the project was by putting together an exhibition at Dutch Design Week ’19 – and it was going to be our biggest one yet. We had a lot of new stuff to exhibit, V4 Machines, V4 products and the year-long research projects. We exhibited it all in the VDMA warehouse – our home for the past year.

We know that with every exhibition usually comes a great deal of waste aaaaand as we were close to the last bit our budget, so we had to be creative with our money, and keeping sustainability in mind! One of the ways we did this was through our recycled PS info boards (previously old CD cases), which were built in a way that could be completely reused after – no screws or holes in them.

The exhibition was divided into three parts, machines, products and research projects. We set up five workspaces which visitors could walk through, collection, shredder, injection, sheet press and extruder, to give them an idea of how these machines would be used in context. The exhibition (we hope) successfully communicated the story of the recycling process starting from collection, to machine, to product. We also had a bigger focus on the Bazar area this year compared to last, including printed out images of workspaces all across the world, really showing the global impact Precious Plastic has. As well, our research projects – Robotics, Beyond Plastic and Fashion were set up in a 3m x 4m cube, where they could showcase all the research they had done over the year.

We also held workshops by our V4 designers, from making a plastic carabiner to a bowl made up of wheat bran and coffee grounds. Throughout the week we also had presentations by designers that also work in sustainability, which were open to the public and held in our cozy colosseum.

The exhibition allowed us to showcase the newest version of Precious Plastic not only to our community but to those who were unaware of Precious Plastic – furthering our reach. It was also a great time to invite people from the community to come and stay with us for the week (at one point there were around 80 of us! A huge thanks to our kitchen team for feeding us twice a day, every day).

Soooo now all the hardware is ready, products are designed, new machines in place! The only thing left to do is documentation, ah boring, but very crucial part for Precious Plastic. Making sure all the things we learned with 100 people in the last year are properly and online so everyone can learn from it. 7th of January everything will be online.

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