Every year, an estimated $50 billion of plastics are lost to the environment, landfill, or incineration. Despite the good intentions of many people, trash and recyclables commonly end up in the wrong place, resulting in massive waste and associated costs.

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As undergraduates at UMass Amherst, Ian Goodine ’21, ’22MS and Ethan Walko ’21, ’22MS were motivated to deploy their engineering skills for the benefit of society. They saw an opportunity to use robotics to improve waste management after China enacted Operation National Sword in 2018, preventing America from exporting its recyclables to China. As a result, the U.S. had to figure out how to handle its recycling domestically.

Today, Goodine and Walko are the cofounders of rStream, a company that uses on-site robotic waste sorting technology to transform mixed waste into clean, distinct recycling streams. Their mobile configuration can be driven right up to facilities that regularly produce large amounts of waste, and it helps to save manual labor, prevent waste, and generate value for companies from recycling.

Early on in their planning for rStream, Goodine and Walko participated in the National Science Foundation-sponsored I-Corps program at UMass Amherst, which supports students, postdoctoral fellows, faculty, and staff teams in transferring technology discoveries into products and services that meet the needs of customers. Through I-Corps customer discovery interviews, they realized they were off-base with the original technology they were trying to develop.

“The discovery that we made when we went out and tested the market was the chemistry of recycling many of these materials is a solved problem,” says Goodine, rStream CEO. “After that, we were able to pivot the technology. The challenge that remains is how we can get enough high-quality material to justify even running the process.”

“I-Corps has informed the way we think about research and tech development. It definitely reinforces always asking the question of why you’re working on this and who is it valuable for,” adds Walko, RStream CTO.

Though Walko and Goodine were young when they were launching rStream, their connections with UMass Amherst and I-Corps helped them get a foot in the door with executives at large companies. “It gets people on the phone because they know what you’re doing is important and they’re excited to help,” says Goodine.

Learn more on the rStream website and in this April 2025 news article about piloting rStream technology on the UMass campus.
 

This story was originally published in July 2025.