MIE Alums Ian Goodine and Ethan Walko Named 2024 Activate Fellows
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Ian Goodine and Ethan Walko, who earned their B.S. and M.S. degrees from the UMass Amherst Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE) Department while inventing a game-changing waste-management technology, added to their bucket list of early-career accomplishments when they were named 2024 Activate Fellows. According to Activate, the fellowship offers “custom-built support for scientists to advance innovations toward new products and services that will combat climate change and the many other global challenges we face.”
The Activate Fellowship includes a living stipend as well as additional benefits, services, and tailored mentorship aimed at helping Fellows explore their entrepreneurial paths.
Goodine and Walko cofounded rStream, a company based on the smart technology they invented while researching in the MIE department. According to their Activate page, “rStream is changing the waste business with SingleSort, a modular system designed to make dumpsters and other waste-collection containers SMART. Using robotics and artificial intelligence (AI), rStream sorts waste from a single input into recycling, compost, and trash containers.”
Activate adds that “Selected from over 1,000 applicants, this new class of fellows is pioneering some of today’s most promising innovations across a range of critical sectors, including energy, transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, and national security. During the two-year Activate Fellowship, our new fellows will turn their breakthroughs into businesses and transform into high-impact science entrepreneurs.”
The critical need addressed by Goodine and Walko with rStream is that, annually, 14 gigatons of recyclable packaging are landfilled or incinerated due to failures in waste collection.
As Goodine and Walko explain, “An estimated $11.4-billion [worth] of scrap value is lost upstream annually by waste haulers, making waste collection the largest opportunity for sustainable and financial impact.”
Enter rStream: “rStream takes waste from a single input and sorts it into recycling, compost, and trash containers with 90-percent accuracy and then pre-hauls it,” explain Goodine and Walko. “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.”
The SingleSort technology can then recapture high-value materials and reintroduce them in a sustainable, closed-loop system with the potential to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by up to five percent. According to Goodine and Walko, “This emissions savings is equivalent to removing 65 percent of automobiles from roads and grounding all commercial flights across the globe.”
rStream has also recently garnered an influential $275,000 National Science Foundation Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant, as well as $125,000 from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center’s AmplifyMass program.
(July 2024)