After little less than 12 months since releasing Precious Plastic Version 4 someone out there downloaded the Precious Plastic download-kit for the 100 thousandth time. On Christmas day, Whuau!

With the release of Precious Plastic Version 4 we introduced a little bit of code that allows us to track (anonymously) the number of downloads of our starterkits. How couldn’t we have thought about it earlier? Ye, dunno. But better late than ever. 

What is a lot in 2020?

One hundred times one thousand. Sounds like a lot. But is it? We don’t know. I mean, is great so many people are ready to take it on their shoulders to tackle the plastic pollution problem. But then again Gnam-Gnam Style has been watched 4 billion times. And this shark video has just become the most watched Youtube video ever. And we wonder. What is a lot in 2020? What is a lot for Precious Plastic? What is a lot for the plastic waste problem? 

Some numbers

Precious Plastic, its Bazar and Community Platform got a total of around 800K visitors in the last year. So you might say 1 in 8 people visiting our websites downloaded Precious Plastic material. If you then consider that 30% of our visitors are returning that number goes up to 1 every 5 visitors that has the download-kit somewhere on their laptop. But then again the same person could be downloading multiple statertkits, or multiple times. 

Unfortunately, having the download kit on your laptop alone means very little. It might make Precious Plastic look a little cooler but it is not really helping to tackle the plastic waste problem. The real question is, how many of these 100k downloads are taken to the next step? How many people can we assume are creating projects to recycle plastic? And from this point we won’t go any further as we would enter the field of pure guessing. 

Costs

And costs? It took Precious Plastic € 300k to develop the knowledge and material in the download-kit. So you could say it cost 3€ for each download. But we give it out all for free. Because the plastic problem is what we focus on. Still, you could be awesome and donate 1$ ( or more) on Patreon so we can keep improving Precious Plastic (shameless plug). 

100.000, a solid number that leaves us with more questions than answers. Classic :) But it is definitely a useful benchmark for the years to come.