Summer 2025: Cans, Cans, Campus
Summer has been a season of firsts for Resin. We launched our first college deployment and our app is now live in both the App Store and Play Store. 🎉 Check out our instagram announcement here. (and give us a follow! I post a lot more behind the scenes content over there.)
🚀 Deployment Highlight: Oakton College
Resin’s very first autonomous aluminum recycling station is live at Oakton College in Des Plaines, IL. This is a huge milestone for us. While our pilot station was retrofit into an existing building, Oakton is our first standalone deployment. It’s a chance to show what a tech-enabled recycling experience can do on campus.
We’ve had the privilege of working with Delaney Malloy , Oakton’s Sustainability Specialist, who has been a key design partner. Delaney’s leadership and vision for campus sustainability made Oakton the perfect launch site.
What makes the station special:
Fully autonomous There’s no staff onsite. Just pour in your cans and be on your way in minutes
Modern design Our seamless app and gamified experience are a sharp contrast to traditional recycling. No more tossing cans into a black hole!
We can’t wait for our next station to go live in the next few weeks and see how Resin continues to enhance student life.
📱 The Resin App is Live
Another major milestone: the Resin app is now available in both the App Store and Play Store! From tracking impact to earning rewards and staying connected, the new app upgrades an already delightful drop-off experience.
📣 Building Our Voice
We're shifting back into go to market mode. We're making a bigger investment in Resin’s social media channels this time around as we focus on college communities.
Behind-the-scenes looks at what goes into building a recycling station
Educational videos about the magic material that is aluminum
The fun we’re having building Resin!
👷 Meet our Mechanical Expert: Andrew Deagon
We’ve had wonderful help from Andrew Deagon , who joined us as a mechanical consultant this summer. Andrew is a fellow Samsara alum and experienced hardware leader. He’s already helped us expand our mechanical support as we transition from prototyping to production.
🔧 Tech Spotlight: Station Bring-Up
What does it take to launch a Resin station? A lot of careful testing, troubleshooting, and patience. When we go onsite with our manufacturing partner, I step into the role of foreman, making sure every detail gets attention. Here’s what that process looks like:
Check every electrical output and input. Nothing goes untested. Maybe the most useful and reliable thing my AI copilot has helped me write is a simple test program that let's me flip every relay and read every input.
Run through all networking cables. A connected station is a working station. You can see how we solve a shipping container being a giant faraday cage here. Without reliable comms, there’s no remote monitoring or maintenance.
Test, test, test. All those cans I fastidiously saved at Labor Day events came in handy when we ran them through our robot over and over again.
Fix mechanical issues on the fly. Real-world conditions reveal what CAD files don’t. Small issues can snowball into big frustrations for customers, so we try to keep a beginner’s mindset and ask: What would this feel like the first time I used it?
We end up with a station we’re confident will stand up to student use, day in and day out. And of course, a smorgasboard of ideas we can implement as we go to streamline both the customer experience and our operations backend.
🔮 Looking Ahead: Two Live College Stations
Oakton is just the start. With a successful station live and app adoption underway we’re building toward a stronger Fall semester and more campus partnerships ahead.
We’re excited to keep proving that recycling can be more accessible, rewarding, and effective.
