Wishful Thinking or the Next Big Airport Contract? What If Every Austin Airport Trash Can Looked Like This
I was just killing time at Austin-Bergstrom (ABIA) last week, iced coffee in hand, staring at the same scene we’ve all seen a thousand times: three giant holes labeled LANDFILL – RECYCLE – COMPOST, with a mountain of clear plastic cups cascading into the wrong bins like a slow-motion environmental disaster.
So I did what any recycling-obsessed founder would do: I snapped photos of the busiest trash stations (Concourse B near Gate 34, the food-court cluster outside Texas Monthly News, and the pre-security Starbucks island). Then I asked AI to drop a sleek R3grind CircularSync unit right into those real photos.
The result? Jaw-dropping.
Imagine walking up to what looks like a normal airport trash island, but instead of three sad holes, there’s a brushed-stainless machine quietly humming. A passenger finishes their Frappuccino, scans a tiny QR code on the side, drops the empty PP cup into the round port, and watches it disappear with a soft thunk. Thirty seconds later the machine has optically verified the cup is clean, shredded it into high-value PP flakes, and stored them in a sealed cassette ready for Plasticrete or similar closed-loop partners. No rinsing station, no contamination, no extra labor for janitorial.
The numbers at an airport are insane:
ABIA serves ~22 million passengers per year
Conservatively, 35 % buy at least one cold beverage = ~7.7 million plastic cups
Average weight 18 g per cup = 138,000 kg (304,000 lbs) of PP headed to landfill today
R3grind processes 600–800 cups per day per unit → just 30 machines across the terminal would divert 100 % of that plastic
And the optics? Airports are desperate to hit zero-waste goals. Austin in particular just announced its 2030 Net-Zero plan. One pilot with R3grind in the two highest-traffic locations would instantly make ABIA the first major U.S. airport actually closing the loop on single-use beverage cups instead of just sorting them into slightly prettier landfills.
So yeah, maybe it’s wishful thinking… or maybe it’s the exact mock-up we email to ABIA’s sustainability team tomorrow morning with the subject line “We can eliminate 300,000 lbs of plastic waste from your terminal this year. Coffee?”
Because when the rendered photos already look this real, the next step is just making it real.
