This AI-powered recycling kiosk belongs in a dumpster

Connected tech disruption reaches a degrading, dehumanizing, and pointless nadir with the Olyns “recycling platform” 

by Steve Coy

Want to throw money in the trash? Try the recycling business. The decades-long, petroleum-fueled and -funded social engineering campaign to convince individual consumers to put some types of refuse (it’s not always clear which — are pizza boxes cardboard if they’re 51% grease?)   into special receptacles was a corporate investment, to be sure. But as for what happens once our recyclables hit the blue bin, years of studies, theorizing and sober self-reflection have concluded that there’s no real green to be made.

But individual consumers can still tread a time-worn path to pocket change: soft drink containers. With five cents built into the price of a Coke just waiting to be extracted, those bottles and cans are free money. That goes double in Michigan, where the 10-cent redemption value lures law-skirting Ohioans over the border to cash in. Some people recycle out of choice: to teach a child a lesson about economic opportunism, or to exercise the “it’s your money; keep it” principle. Others do it because they have to. We’ve all seen, or perhaps been, the person lugging a garbage bag of empties to be exchanged for gas or meal money. Even if the hourly wage of collecting and schlepping bottles and cans to a recycling center amounts to sub-sub-minimum wage, it’s the one part of consumer-driven recycling that “works.”

Enter Olyns, a Silicon Valley-based firm aiming to fix that. 

The explainer video — sorry, “film” — on the company’s site tells a familiar story: a couple of ex-Apple staffers saw a problem aching to be solved, assembled a team of engineers, and devised a tech-powered solution. Olyns –named, one assumes, after trying to visit Onlyfans with a broken keyboard – is in its founders’ words, a “recycling platform” upon which to fix a broken system. How? By “connecting people to recycling and brands to consumers.” Simple as!

To their credit, the Olyns Cube™ (cube proportions not guaranteed) is almost genius: a vending machine-sized box at high-traffic locations like grocery stores and pharmacies, with advertisers (mostly beverage brands) co-opting the Cube’s frontage to make the enterprise profitable. That last part makes economic and karmic sense; if there’s anyone who ought to subsidize the recycling of plastic bottles, it’s the companies who pushed them on us in the first place.

It’s a great idea in principle, increasing access to recycling facilities by piggybacking onto routine errands. It doesn’t displace or replace human workers — automated recycling machines have been around for years, and the Cubes are net-new installations in places that don’t have cash-for-cans dropoff nearby. Even the “AI” application, while easy to mock, is sensible and appropriately limited: a built-in scanner identifies and sorts containers, and alerts a human picker-upper when the machine is full. By all means, let the robots do that.

Olyns’ hearts are in the right place. It’s too bad about their broken brains. 

When one cashes in one’s empties the old-fashioned way, it’s a straightforward process: Put can in machine, get receipt, exchange receipt with nearby human cashier for money. 

Here’s how to convert containers to cash at a Cube with Olyns, the new and better way:

1. Download Olyns app and create a MyOlyns account. No smartphone? This isn’t for you — and very little in this world is.
2. Connect your MyOlyns account to your PayPal account. No PayPal account? Go to Step 0: selling a Metallica tour t-shirt on eBay circa 2001.
3. Hold your phone up to the Cube to initiate a recycling session, capped at 10 minutes, with mandatory 5-minute pauses in between, so that the other Olynsers eagerly queuing behind you can benefit from expanded access to recycling facilities in their area. No need to hog the Cube, boy!
4. Feed containers into Cube. You may insert one (1) every 15 seconds or so — 12 if you give the machine your undivided attention. It’s slower than the machines that have been around for years, you see, because AI. A red or green light will alert you when the Cube is ready to receive — but do not, under any circumstances, miss the window by even a fraction of a second, or the Cube will be displeased, most displeased indeed. And if those beer cans are lightly dented? Buddy. Run. To a scrap metal facility near you. The Cube demands its offerings pure, unspoiled.
5. Open MyOlyns app and “cash out” your earnings to PayPal. 
6. Repeat step 5, but with PayPal.
7. $$$ or something like it. 

If for some reason you’ve gone through all that and don’t want money, you may convert your earnings, plus your accumulated “bonus points” (one cent per container), into a handful of rewards. A 20% rebate coupon for a 6-pack of San Pellegrino is 2000 points; after purchase, simply take a picture of your receipt and email it to rewards@olyns.com from the email address associate with your MyOlyns account, then wait for the cash value to be deposited into said account and see Step 5. 

Don’t like San Pellegrino? Me neither — its paltry fizz is meant for fey Europeans who drink it at room temperature and would explode upon ingesting a Topo Chico. Not to worry, an Olyns tote bag (you could use another one) may be yours for just 15,000 OlynsPoints™.

I wish the Olyns founders could be forced to experience the futility and embarrassment of standing at one of their Cubes, practically begging it to eat your trash, short-circuiting when the robot spits it back out at you with a flash of red light. The frantic push to rid yourself of all your containers within the allotted 10-minute window. The impotent rage when you don’t, and must wait out the cooling-off period and log back on to start a new session for those lonely stragglers. It’s the Office Space paper jam for people who want to make a couple bucks. 

But those people aren’t Olyns users. The Cubes are located, for now, in well-heeled Bay Area suburbs with curbside recycling programs, home to people for whom “increased access to recycling” would mean “a guy plucks the empty Olipop can from your hand and takes it to your garage.” These people aren’t wasting their time screaming at a robot outside a downmarket grocery store. 

Given the barriers to entry and use, Olyns isn’t better than the alternative for people who need to recycle. And it doesn’t solve a problem for the people who don’t. Who, then, are these Cubes for?

The first item in the top-level navigation of the Olyns website isn’t “Locations” or “How it works” or “Why Olyns?” It’s “Media Network.” Click it and you’ll see the game spelled out in a pitch to property owners. “Olyns brings more of the right customers to your store: The young, affluent, climate-conscious ones.” Left unsaid is the type of recycler the Cube is precision-engineered to keep away: poor people with a shopping cart full of scavenged empties.

Install a Cube at your store to get a cut of the revenue from Olyns’ brand partners, targeted at those desirable customers and displayed on a 55” screen. (It’s a near-certainty that Olyns sells user data to other advertisers looking for climate-conscious saps, which might explain why I’ve been seeing Instagram posts for a $999 machine that turns household food scraps into chicken feed.) 

More dubious propositions for Olyns’ retail partners include a bump in foot traffic and “increased basket sizes” from shoppers taking advantage of QR code-enabled offers available in-store. But the real pitch to business owners amounts to vibes. Store managers love Olyns, the company’s site claims, “because we take the hassle out of in-store recycling, offer a service customers appreciate, and boost the store’s sustainability credentials.” 

Maybe all that is true. Maybe it’s even Good. It’s not like Olyns is the only company looking to monetize a little slice of everyday life by sticking an ad network where it never belonged. It’s not the only rent-seeker looking to make a little dough on “the float.” And if Olyns really delivers recycling that pays for itself, even on a small scale, perhaps it’s worth 10 minutes of Cube-based debasement every couple of weeks. Hell, I buy so much Coke Zero at my local Safeway that returning the cans from whence they came has a certain poetry. I just wish recycling didn’t make me feel like garbage. 

Steve Coy is a writer dodging brain worms in one of those well-heeled Bay Area suburbs. Find him on Bluesky @mcleemz.bky.social