MIE Alums Ian Goodine and Ethan Walko Bring Groundbreaking Waste-management System to Campus
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Every year Americans send $11.4-billion worth of recoverable material to landfill. One example of how inefficiently Americans handle their plastic discards is that in 2017 alone we generated 35-million tons of plastic solid waste in the U.S., with only eight percent recycled. Now Ian Goodine and Ethan Walko, two award-winning alumni from the UMass Amherst Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE) Department, are teaming up with the award-winning UMass Dining Services to run a trailblazing pilot program that employs innovations in computer vision and data science to begin cleaning up America’s woefully wasteful waste stream. See UMass News Office article: AI-driven Recycling Pilot Program Launches at UMass Campus Center.
“Ian and Ethan conceived, incubated, and co-founded their own company, called rStream, while they were working on their B.S. and M.S. degrees from the MIE department,” said MIE Department Head Sundar Krishnamurty, the Ronnie & Eugene M. Isenberg Endowed Distinguished Professor in Engineering. “From that beginning, aided by the resources of the MIE department and the university, they have launched rStream, focused on their own pioneering technology, which applies smart waste management and recycling as based on artificial intelligence.”
Goodine and Walko demonstrated their smart technology, dubbed AuditPRO, to members of the press and the UMass Amherst community on Oct. 17 in the Lincoln Campus Center. This collaborative pilot project between rStream and the much-celebrated UMass Dining Services will run throughout the fall semester while the recycling system resides in the Lincoln Campus Center concourse.
As Walko explained about the pilot project in a UMass News Office article, “It tests rStream’s artificial intelligence and will identify in real time what goes into the waste stream. These data reports will provide feedback to the sustainability team at UMass which can be used to inform waste-reduction efforts.”
Goodine told the News Office that “The big problem in recycling is people just don’t put stuff in the right bin. This often leads to ‘capture rates’ — the number of recyclables diverted from the waste stream — of only 30 percent.”
Goodine added that the computer vision and robotic innovations in rStream’s technology will take the “which bin does this go in?” guesswork away from consumers. “The world rStream wants to make is one where consumers put everything in a single bin, and automation does the rest.”
The new rStream company and its cutting-edge recycling process have proven so successful that Goodine and Walko were named to BostInno’s “25 Under 25” class for 2022, a prestigious list of 25 young company founders, nonprofit leaders, standout startup employees, students, and other prodigies.
According to BostInno, rStream is a groundbreaking approach to facilitate the proper collection of recyclables to curb the vast amount of plastic dumped into landfills each year. With accurate collection, discarded waste can be reused to manufacture innumerable items and technologies in an eco-friendly way.
In a 2022 BostInno article, Goodine and Walko said that “rStream’s solution addresses the first step of material recovery, the decisions made when you first throw something away. By accurately diverting recyclables and compostables from trash, we allow waste companies to capitalize on the scrap value of materials and supply the circular economy [by reutilizing them].”
As Goodine and Walko concluded in the BostInno article, “Look around, plastic is everywhere. It lives forever, so it's perfect to build with and awful to trash. rStream is looking to create a world of hands-free waste collection with more recyclables being captured than ever before. This will significantly increase the chances for materials to reach a sustainable end of life and help the historically low recycling rates.”
rStream and its brilliant recycling process have also attracted 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. (October 2023)