rStream is changing the waste business with the SingleSort, a modular system designed to make dumpsters and other waste collection containers SMART. Using robotics and AI, rStream sorts waste from a single input into recycling, compost, and trash containers with 90 percent accuracy.
FELLOWS
Ian Goodine
Ian Goodine is the co-founder and CEO of rStream. Previously, he worked in various engineering roles at Glaukos. He received a B.S. and M.S. in mechanical engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst with research focuses in robotic biomimicry and polymer engineering. Goodine and his team are focused on creating robotic technology to solve the upstream challenges of waste and materials recovery.
Ethan Walko
Ethan Walko is the co-founder and CTO of rStream, a robotics company focused on the upstream challenges of waste and materials recovery. With a lifelong passion for building, his projects have spanned from automotive transplants to plastics manufacturing devices. Walko holds a B.S. and M.S. in mechanical engineering from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Before starting rStream, he worked in materials and polymer engineering research labs at UMass and for a metrology company as a field engineer.
TECHNOLOGY
Critical Need
Customer and regulatory demands have prompted waste and recycling companies to make sustainable material recovery into a profitable line of business. Yet annually, 14 gigatons of recyclable packaging (~70 percent of the total produced) are landfilled or incinerated due to failures in waste collection. Paired with China’s 2017 import ban on recyclables, these shortcomings inhibit domestic supply chains, increasing recycling costs by 50-1,000 percent and necessitating virgin resource extraction, leading to GHG emissions. An estimated $11.4B of scrap value is lost upstream annually by waste haulers, making waste collection the largest opportunity for sustainable and financial impact.
Technology Vision
Using highly robust robotics and AI, rStream reimagines the waste business with the SingleSort, a modular system designed to make dumpsters and other waste collection containers “smart.” rStream takes waste from a single input and sorts it into recycling, compost, and trash containers with 90 percent accuracy. This automated process greatly increases the overall efficiency and efficacy of recycling to increase the supply, quality, and cost parity of recycled content for manufacturing.
Potential for Impact
By offering an easily deployable method to improve recycling conversion, rStream’s technology can be leveraged to recapture high-value materials and re-introduce them in a sustainable, closed-loop system. Using these secondary materials instead of imported raw materials, allow manufacturers with rStream in their supply chain to have the potential to reduce CO2 emissions by up to five percent. This emissions savings is equivalent to removing 65 percent of automobiles from roads and grounding all commercial flights across the globe.
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rStream