Olyns Cube delivers incentives and convenience for bottle recycling

Founded in 2019, San Francisco Bay Area startup Olyns has given consumers an outlet to put empty bottles and cans to good use through its reverse vending machine (RVM), the Olyns Cube. For Philip Stanger, co-founder and CEO of Olyns, the idea originated as a reaction to the dismal plastic pollution statistics. Stanger sought a solution to embolden recycling efforts; the answer became the Olyns Cube, a platform that Stanger and his team have launched to provide a user-friendly way to curtail plastic waste. Designed for high-traffic locations such as malls and cinemas, the cube unites sustainability, technology and advertising to make recycling convenient. 

Stanger’s expertise lies in technology and advertising, having worked for Apple before starting Olyns. Gaining experience in these disciplines, which he says are parallel to recycling, supplied him with distinct advantages.

“We managed to bring what I think is a fresh perspective to this because we didn’t necessarily have the accepted orthodoxies that were limiting finding a solution,” Stanger says.

Photo courtesy of Olyns

Inspired by these other industries, Olyns was able to devise an RVM that can be economically and environmentally sustainable. Currently, Cubes are located in four Safeway supermarkets in California. Two Cubes also were featured at PepsiCo’s Trash Talk activation at Super Bowl LVI.

The key to the Cube’s success, Stanger says, is based on a retail media model. Revenue for the machine is sustained through its use of retail media, which is advertising situated near the point of purchase. Stanger says retail media is facing meteoric growth, while the popularity of online advertising is slowing because of privacy concerns. In the case of the Olyns Cube, retail media comes in the form of 15-second-long full-motion videos on the Cube’s 65-inch screen. This model is what makes the cube financially viable in the long run.

“One of the big problems with recycling, of course, is not the fact that people don’t want to do it—everybody wants to do it. It’s just that they need to have convenience, they need to have the incentives, and then there’s got to be some sort of operational elements that can support it in an efficient way. And in a lot of cases, unless there is government sponsorship in those bottle bill states, it hasn’t existed,” Stanger says.

Advertisers featured on the cube include clothing, food and beverage and banking companies, all of which Stanger says are interested in sustainable products and environmental, social and governance investing. The cube, Stanger says, allows brands to align their messages with a verifiable act of sustainability.

Another core function of the Olyns Cube is its distribution of rewards to people who deposit plastic, aluminum or glass beverage containers.

To gain rewards, a user must download the Olyns app on his or her phone. The app comes with a near field communication, or NFC, card—think Apple Pay or Google Pay—that can be tapped on a cube to access it. Once the user places an empty beverage container into a slot, the cube uses artificial intelligence, or AI, sorting technology to identify the size and type of the bottle, dropping it into one of three compartments that indicate plastic, aluminum or glass material.

Users in bottle bill states, including California and nine other states, would receive money based on state regulations. In California, bottle bill legislation has resulted in the California Redemption Value (CRV), a regulatory fee paid on recyclable beverage containers that ranges from 5 cents for containers less than 24 fluid ounces to 10 cents for containers 24 fluid ounces or larger. Californians will therefore get 5 cents or 10 cents back for depositing a bottle into the Olyns Cube. The money is processed through PayPal, and the user decides whether to put it into a PayPal account or send it to a credit card.

Olyns also is looking to expand to other nonbottle bill states. For these states, the company is deciding how to apply gamification aspects to create a randomized reward system instead.

The app contains two other notable functions to incentivize recycling: a community leaderboard that compares a user’s recycling progress with others and an environmental impact dashboard that shows a user his or her environmental contributions. The dashboard shows the number of deposited containers, the amount of C02 saved and the amount of waste diverted from landfills, oceans and incineration. Stanger says this is a critical feature to reassure those who want an identifiable impact of recycling.

Photo courtesy of Olyns

“We’re providing that feedback and giving people that agency to understand that this action is not meaningless, that there is benefit. No matter how small it may seem, it does add up because what we do is we give the individual’s contribution as well as Olyns’ contribution as a community, and people can then see that that individual contribution adds up to quite a significant amount once it’s added to the community,” Stanger says.

Olyns ensures proper Cube maintenance through its use of a gig economy, contracting freelance workers much like rideshare services. The enrolled workers, called “sherpas,” empty cubes that reach full capacity and take the contents to Olyns or a recycling processor. When the app indicates a cube is full using a color-coded system, a sherpa can claim it. Once he or she arrives, the sherpa taps the Cube with the NFC card on his or her Olyns app, which is different than a standard user’s card, to open the machine. Using the app, the sherpa must scan the QR code on each bag within the machine to associate the bags with the sherpa, who is paid upon delivering them. The recyclable bottles that reach a processor are well-sorted and noncontaminated with low levels of liquid due to the AI sorting technology, according to Olyns.

So far, Stanger says reception for the cube has been overwhelmingly positive. They have been filling up faster than the Olyns team thought, sometimes several times per day. According to Olyns, a single Cube can compress and store more than 1,000 plastic containers, 850 aluminum cans and 50 glass bottles, and can deliver two metric tons of clean recycled polyethylene terephthalate (PET) per year. Olyns is now focused on hardware design and reaching out to more locations.

Another nine Cubes are planned by the end of June, and Stanger says he expects several dozen more in the Bay Area by the end of the year. Olyns also is communicating with companies to introduce pilots outside of California. A pilot project in the South featuring 25 machines potentially could be established near the end of the year, Stanger says.

In terms of hardware, Olyns plans to continue drafting new designs that offer recycling for other products besides beverage bottles. Stanger says Olyns will start collaborating with a major candy manufacturer to create a version of the cube that can recycle plastic candy boxes. These versions of the cube tentatively will be up and running in California near the end of summer. The Cube potentially can be used to collect other recyclables, such as shampoo and detergent containers made of high-density polyethylene.

Olyns’ establishment comes after a wave of recycling facility closures in California. In 2019, California’s largest recycling redemption and processing centers operator, RePlanet, closed all 284 of its remaining centers after first closing 191 centers in 2016. The Olyns Cube avoids this roadblock and others that have kept people from accessing ways to recycle and receive bottle bill benefits.

With new locations, machine versions and collaborations on the horizon, Olyns is determined to maintain rapid growth in the recycling industry.

“I have been involved in technology a lot of my life with different startups and I have not had an experience that has been moving this fast, has had this much positive reception, really in my career," Stanger says. "So, obviously, we’ve tapped into a need. And we would like to satisfy that need as fast as possible.”