For visitors to Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, it’s a place to catch a Patriots game or a recent World Cup match. But for AI-powered robotics sorting company rStream, it’s a place to expand their evolving technology while helping the stadium meet its waste diversion goals.
rStream’s co-founders, Ethan Walko and Ian Goodine, see places like stadiums, airports and universities as a unique niche for the company’s sorting technology. rStream was designed to fit in smaller spaces and target recyclables from lower-throughput areas. The company believes that the larger-scale sorting technologies marketed to some recycling centers isn’t feasible for these more logistically challenging spots.
The company also plans to market the technology in “lower resource areas where you can't justify the investment in a 40-ton-per-hour MRF just because you don't have the materials in that region,” Walko said in an interview with Waste Dive.
Insights from its partnership with Gillette Stadium will help the company refine its offerings as it soon launches the fifth iteration of its sorting technology and expands to new locations in coming months. It’s also fueled by a new $1.25 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Remade Institute, announced earlier this month.
Tailoring the technology for Gillette Stadium
For the Gillette Stadium partnership, rStream began working with the operations team back in 2024 to design a recycling and waste diversion solution. The team had already done a full stadium audit the previous year and knew they wanted to increase their on-site waste diversion rate, he said.
rStream automated the waste sorting process using a trailer-based system, which was parked out at the loading dock where the operations team already stored waste and recycling near the stadium’s compactors. The computer vision technology identifies and sorts the stadium's full waste stream on-site by separating recyclables, compostable materials and trash. Win Waste is the hauler contracted to handle Gillette Stadium’s materials from there.
rStream’s sorting process has about a 99% accuracy rate and eliminates the need to sort these items by hand, Walko said. Across seven recent stadium events, rStream sorted out 479,000 individual recyclable objects.
"This partnership with rStream helps us manage waste more responsibly and efficiently while creating a better working environment for our staff and providing data that helps us continuously improve our operations," said John Flaherty, senior vice president of operations at stadium owner Kraft Sports + Entertainment, in a statement.
rStream’s data collection efforts log specific information about materials in the stream, creating a “digital record” of each event, rStream said in a news release about the partnership.
This service is valuable for stadiums and other event centers that need the data to meet reporting requirements, including certain MassDEP waste diversion regulations and building-specific LEED certification through the U.S. Green Building Council, Walko said.
For the recent World Cup soccer games held this summer, FIFA encouraged every stadium, including Gillette, to “set ambitious goals for reducing the amount of waste they create.”
“Big public venues like a stadium might have revenue opportunities tied to those [sustainability] requirements,” Walko said, citing musical artists like Coldplay and Billie Eilish that have made sustainable stadium practices central to their tours. “So now you're starting to evaluate this on a whole new axis of, ‘Oh, okay, our sorting program is actually unlocking all these huge opportunities, and if we're not doing it, but every other stadium is, then we're kind of falling behind.’ So it's almost table stakes now at this point,” he said.
rStream also customizes its technology for each venue, an offering Walko said is necessary to more accurately capture the needs and challenges of dynamic spaces like concert venues or airports.
“Our vision models are specific to sites because although you have the same general categories of waste, you'll always have differences in terms of the exact materials. If you want to get really high accuracy, it's good to make unique models that can run at each site,” he said.
The Gillette Stadium model has been a valuable proving ground for the technology, said Ian Goodine, co-founder and CEO of rStream, in a statement. “We are not just dropping a robot on the loading dock. We are giving the building a smarter way to run one of its toughest operations.”
What’s next
rStream will next turn its focus to other venues and short-term projects in the coming months. Walko and Goodine hope to also broaden its services at airports.
“Millions of people are traveling through the large ones every single year. There's dining areas, there’s single-use materials and a variety of people coming from different backgrounds,” Walko said. “When you get that transient population of folks, it's really difficult to communicate recycling rules effectively, and I think that's where we want to be able to bring automation to address that confusion and help to make sure materials are being handled accurately.”
Later in 2027, rStream also anticipates releasing the fifth version of its system, which Walko said is meant to be a smaller and more compact model that’s no longer on a trailer.
“That'll help it be scalable across more markets, whereas the current one is really tailored towards the stadiums,” he said.
