#40 We made a roof from RECYCLED PLASTIC sheets

Hey, welcome to a new Project Camp update. So we bought this big piece of land and are prototyping a more sustainable way of living. Not sure how it's going to go, but let's see. And in the previous video you could see us building a roof for our pizza. So we now have a pizza hut. And in this video we're going to build a roof for our shipping container. But it's not going to be just a normal roof. We're going to do something experimental. Something which I actually have never seen before. We're going to make a roof from recycled plastic sheets. No idea if this makes sense or how it would behave in the long term. But that's why we're going to try it out. We'll document it. So it's a bit like a living prototype. So let's start off with the most important thing first. Getting the sheets. Okay, so we want to get our sheets from a Precisious Plastic workspace. In case you don't know, Precisious Plastic is a project that provides knowledge and machines to recycle plastic. And it's all shared, open source for free. So you can start your own plastic recycling workspace. It's kind of cool. I think the project is from Denmark or something. I don't know. I would say check out their website. They have this cool map where you can find all their different kind of workspaces around the world. And we need sheets. So we went to the map to find the closest by Sheepas workspace. In this case, it's here in France. So we asked them to make our sheets. Hi, we are Fabunit and we are going to make roof tiles for Project Camp. We're going to make it from polypropylene coming from industrial waste. We're going to make 28 of it. 10 mm thick with CNC finish. Let's go! So here we have our sheets. They actually look super beautiful. Very well finished and smooth. A nice CNC cut edge to make sure we can overlap them and it doesn't leak. So it's nice to see the flaky pattern, to see the yellow blending in the white. It almost looks like a stone. You might wonder why would you use recycled plastic in this natural environment? And I think in general, if you think about sustainable living, you have these two options. You use more natural materials, but also more recycled materials. So using what's already there. And this is a test to see how can we incorporate recycled plastics. And we do this more often. We also have some recycled bowls we're using or a brick wall or a toilet seat. Just to test out to see if we can realistically incorporate it in our lives and how it behaves over time. So this is just another one of those tests. Because we don't know how it behaves with the sun and the UV degradation. Or the rain, how it influences the sheets. So we're gonna build it, test it out, analyze it, keep track of it and document it. And in the end, we might tell you guys, never build a plastic roof because it doesn't make any sense. Or maybe it does make sense. And in that case, it would be kind of a useful application. Because there are many roofs to build and a lot of plastic goes into one sheet. So this is 10 kg. So you can recycle quite in bulk amounts. So this is 280 kg of plastic. But before we're going to install the roof, we first need to build a structure. So we're going to do that next. We're going to build the structure right there in front of the kitchen. First, we're going to make some space and prepare the ground. So next, we're going to build a piece of metal to attach the wooden beams under the plastic sheets to the metal frame of the solar there. This is going to be a bit of cutting, welding, drilling and painting. So let's start. So the wood arrived. We have a lot of oiling, sanding and cutting ahead of us. This will take us a lot of hours, quite a few days. But for you guys with me, much quicker. All right, so now we have all the wood cutted. As you can see, it's kind of a lot actually compared to the size of base camp. It's laying all around. We have some there, some here. But basically everything is now cutted. Here you can see a lot of sawdust we made. And we're going to use that for our compost toilet. And here the dark brown area is going to be the floor. Here the big beams are going to be used as pillars to hold up the roof. And over here, this is going to be for the roof. And as you can see, we made a lot of cuts in here. So it should all just be puzzled and fit together. I'm not sure how it's actually going to go, because all the wood is a little bit bended and warped. But I guess we're going to see next when we're actually going to assemble it. So we have a little issue here. This beam goes in this part of the container, laying here. But in this side, as you can see, it's a bit bended. So we'll need to bend it down. Easy. Easy. Does it work? Not working. We're going to try with a car jack to bend it back. Let's see. I don't know how it's going to go. But let's see. So we finally cut a little piece here, because the car jack didn't go. And bending this down, it's quite impossible by hand. So we cut it and now it fits. So the floor structure is now ready. It's all leveled, straight, connected. So we can walk on it. We added a few points to lift up the wood. Not the most elegant solution, but it works. And the beams itself are clamped in this edge in the container, together with this one. Next, we're going to continue building the structure, to make sure everything is straight. Then we're going to put in the floor paneling and the roof paneling. You can hold it there. This is like... So the roof is now up. Next, the floor. The entire structure is now ready and sturdy. And the frame on top should hold 28 sheets. So yeah, let's try. So we're now going to put up the sheets on the roof. And there are a bit of difference in the pattern. So you have with white flakes and more dark ones. So we're going to make a nice pattern. And also we have two different tiles. One, our legs flush on one side and have the overlap here. So we can put them together. And the middle ones have an overlap on both sides. So we need to puzzle them together to make sure it all fits. But yeah, it's time to put on the roof. Finish. All right, yeah, so structure is now ready. And this really felt like the last thing to set up for base camp. So we have a shady place in the summer. Not in the winter. In the winter it serves as a rain roof. So now we have a good comfortable setup here. So we can continue being on the land and do all the other work we have to do. But we're going to stop now because this is the end of season one. But we're going to come back the 14th of April when season two starts. So make sure to subscribe so you don't forget to see that video. Because we have a lot of big things we still have to do. All right, so that was it. Thanks for watching and see you in the next season.