Welcome to a new precious plastic video. In this video we're going to talk about plastic, what it is that are different types and a glimpse of what you can make with it. Okay, so I'm sure you already know about plastic. I mean it's everywhere around us. Jerry cans, packaging, flower pots, toys, containers, cups. A lot of stuff we have is made from plastic. You can literally find this on any place in the world, even on places where we don't want to have it. And last year we produced a lot of it. I mean I cannot even imagine how much this is. In fact, I couldn't even pronounce it, that's why I wrote it down. And this number is still growing every year because we keep producing more new plastic. Which is kind of weird because on the one hand it's made from oil, which is a precious fossil fuel we're running out of. And on the other hand, it ends up on places in the world where we don't want it, damaging our planet and environment. In fact, research has said that less than 10% of our plastic actually gets recycled. So of all the new plastic we make, a lot of it ends up in the wrong place. Time to get recycling, right? So plastic often looks and feels the same, but it's probably not. In fact, there are thousands of different types of plastic out there, but we can narrow it down into two main categories. So for instance, this bowling ball is a thermal set and this lunchbox is a thermal plastic. And the biggest difference is that the lunchbox, you can always re-melter it. So when you're done with this, you can melt the plastic again and turn it back to another shape or its original shape. And this bowling ball is made from polyester. It's molded into this shape and afterward you cannot re-melter it. This is basically a block of material which you cannot really do anything with and this one you can just re-melter it and reuse it again. And luckily about 80% of the plastic is made from this type, which is a good thing because this one is easy to recycle. In fact, it often has this little logo on the bottom which says that you can recycle it. And this is what the plastic looks like as a raw material. Small pellets that are used over the entire plastic industry to create new things. But even within this group of plastic, there are many different types, but we can narrow them down again into several main groups, which basically all the plastic around you is made from. And each of them has their own difficult technical name like polypropylene, polystyrene. I don't know why they make it so difficult, so often the shorter version is being used. It's hard to tell the difference between two types of plastic. I mean, they can have the same color, feel the same and look the same, but still being a different type. And this is actually the main problem with plastic. How to separate the different types of plastic because they all have different properties, behaviors and melting temperatures. But there are a few tricks on how to get this done. Trick number one and this is by far the easiest one is look for the logo. If it has a recycle logo, you can see which type of plastic it is. So this one is made from polypropylene. And unfortunately, not every plastic product has a logo like this. And then you need another trick number two is to remember it. And this is actually often done in recycling plants. So for instance, flower pots made from polypropylene. Lego is made from ABS. The bottle caps are made from HSTPE. But as you can imagine, there's a lot of different plastic outer, a lot of things to remember. So this goes wrong and isn't 100% accurate. Another one is to look at the visual properties. For instance, polystyrene has this breakable sound. Whereas polyethylene has a more flexible and tough kind of plastic. And then there's another technique which is called the flame technique. We don't recommend this, but it's a technique. So we're going to show you. For instance, if you burn plastic, you get a little flame. So this one has a nice yellow flame. We're going to fire up this one. So and this has like this dark smoke which is polystyrene. Well, like I said, we don't recommend this technique. Yeah, it's not nice. The last one is the floating technique. This is quite an interesting one. So let's say you have a lot of different types of plastic mixed. You can put them in the water and some will sink and some will float. And then we're going to add some water. So as you can see, some plastic floats and we'll sink. But if we add some salt. So as you can see, the body properly floats and the fat sinks. And you can do this with other types of plastic as well by changing the density of the water. And all the more detailed information like the different densities or the different flame colors or the visual properties, you can download it in our download pack. So as we just learned, there are many different types of plastic out there. And the ones that you can recycle basically all work according to the same principle. You need some heating and some pressure to mold it into something new. And that's pretty much the basic start of the entire plastic industry. They all work according to these principles. But they have a lot of variation. So they have extrusion molding, injection molding, blow molding. And by making a different combination of this technique, they can make a whole range of different products. And our machines are based on this techniques as well. Only simplified and made with local tools and materials so you can build them yourself. So that's it for the plastic video. All the additional information you can download. If you have a question, feel free to post a topic in our forums. In our next video, we're going to build the machines so we can turn plastic into new things. Hope to see you there.