Harsh Madan

ReCirculate Systems

ReCirculate Systems is a scalable reusable container service designed to replace single-use food packaging across institutional, urban, and city-wide contexts. The system uses commercially available polypropylene containers (G.E.T. Eco-Takeouts) issued at vendors and returned through hybrid QR/NFC kiosks placed along natural movement paths. Containers are then collected, centrally cleaned, and redistributed in a continuous Swap. Track. Return. Clean. Redistribute. loop — keeping materials in a controlled circulation rather than the disposal stream.The project shifted from designing a better container to designing a complete service: a container-as-a-service model where complexity sits in centralized cleaning, logistics, and tracking, while users and vendors interact with something that feels as fast and familiar as the disposable system it replaces. Campuses act as pilot environments — high-density, controlled, and rich in existing infrastructure — with a phased scaling roadmap from a single café pilot to multi-vendor buildings to fully integrated urban networks.Key components include a kiosk strategy informed by campus service-point research, a service blueprint connecting user actions, frontstage, backstage, and supporting systems, a QR/NFC data flow that issues, tracks, reminds, and refunds without requiring a new app, and a business model canvas grounded in vendor subscriptions, institutional support, and sustainability funding. Five design principles guided the work: return must be as fast as disposal, refund must be immediate, vendor effort must not increase, hygiene must be verifiable, and tracking must be seamless.

“Single-use packaging dominates because the current system is better designed for disposal than for reuse. ReCirculate reframes takeout waste as a service problem rather than a product problem: convenience is not the opposite of sustainability, it is the condition that makes sustainability possible.By moving the burden of cleaning, tracking, and logistics into a coordinated backend, the system makes reuse the default rather than an alternative. The aim is shared urban infrastructure for packaging — closer in spirit to public transit or waste management than to a product line — where containers move seamlessly across vendors, neighborhoods, and cities, and where reducing waste is a byproduct of an experience that simply works.”