I am not a true believer in capitalism. I have spent much time thinking about it, but it comes down to money being an object and not a goal, and somewhere along the lines of capitalism's recent history, it became the goal and not a tool.
There are many stories and examples for all the good and bad that money brought to the world, and for a while, it was a good engine to drive other changes around. Depending on context, situation, and circumstances, in today's world money is still a harsh fact. But it's still just a "thing" we use to represent value, and it is a "thing" sometimes standing in the way our resources we need.
I am a big believer in people. I have spent much time thinking about it too, and with the many stories of good and bad people, good and bad actions, I have to believe (for selfish reasons) that generally speaking we are marching towards a world more united than divided. All the harsh realities of the human experience are difficult in the moment but are blurred away in the aspect of time and magnitude of scale of the human condition. As history moves forward, some people are reduced to statistics and trends. The overall change of humanity is for betterment over time, but individuals must suffer along the way for it to be achieved.
There are many small projects to demonstrate what is possible, and combining a few of them together can increase the benefits. This post is about one such possibility, combining disjoined ideas.
The first part is plastic and recycling. Precious Plastic has a set of open source kits to create machines that recycle plastic. Different kinds of machines for different purposes, they have 2 different types - one to shred existing plastic into small bits, and the other to turn those bits into other things.
The other things can be molded objects, either injected or compressed, or a long thread of plastic (called filament) to be used with other 3D-printers, and thus support even more complex objects.
For this purpose, a shredded is needed and one injection machine, with at least one toekn/coin type mold to start.
The second part is local businesses and their community support. Save on meats created a token program to provide meals for people in need. Any patron of their existing diner can purchase tokens, and give them away to hungry people. The tokens can only be redeemed for food, and only at their dinner, which helps them retain value and discourage abuse. And this is where the project can scale up.
Different neighborhoods can create such programs for their own local watering holes, local food establishments, and even local available rooms at some hotels/motels/etc. Machines are cheap for a community and provide lots of benefits and future possibilities - different molds, extra 3D printers, reducing costs of recycling elsewhere. The main purpose is that this makes no real profit, just provide resources to people in need. Different tokens for clothers, shoes, food, and shelter, can guarantee that a token provided to a person cannot be abused, and constant prices honored by all establishments participating in such a project guarantee stability of the system.
Different food joints provide different meals for the food token, different clothing thrift stores can assign an item count per token, i.e. one jacket or two shirts or 3 pairs of socks, but all variations are of known value. Meal tokens are sold for $5, clothes for $10, etc.
Each shredding and molding machine can produce different tokens, and those can be sold to local businesses. Those in turn would sell tokens for the cost of purchase, which should be well known and agreed by all businesses that participate. There would be no incentive to purchase a "cheap" token from one place and get an "expensive" meal at a different place if the costs are the same, and the value provided is similar - a meal to a hungry person.
Save the planet from too much plastic in landfills, get community involvement, and help other people in need, one small step at a time. Some places even have micro-projects that can help with money to make it happen.
