I used to take my cans and bottles to a recycling center where they measured by weight. They didn’t pay the full CRV, plus it was loud, smelly, dirty, and not close to home. When I discovered there was an Olyns cube in a nearby Safeway, I was curious and have it a try. So far it’s been generally quite easy. I love how it connects to PayPal and pays whenever you want to cash out. Sometimes there are technical difficulties with the machines but normally I can get 50 cans in pretty quickly. The biggest annoyance is that the machines fill up very quickly and I have to time my trips by checking the app. I wish there were more locations as well. For example there’s a Whole Foods, another Safeway, and several Asian markets in my town but only one Olyns in a Safeway.The app is quite bare-bones and would benefit from the following features:-ability to set a favorite/home location and get notifications when it’s empty, full, etc-ability to send an SOS to their team when the machine freezes-linking to your navigation app when you click on a locationThe 50/day restriction is actually CA state law, not the fault of Olyns. It’s annoying, but at least my husband and I can each do 50/day to get through our backlog.

I have been excited since this came out and have been wanting to use the recycling cubes. We don’t have recycling centers where I can walk to and having a disability it makes it hard. I’ve noticed that they fill up every day by around 11 AM and I work evening night shifts so by the time that I have a chance to even go to it every single time it’s been filled. We have two directly in my area and they are always filled, the store that I work at also has had an uptick of people going through our trash cans, throwing trash everywhere to take the bottles and cans out to go across the street to recycle them. I have nothing against recycling, and love doing it myself. It’s just frustrating when the area we live in really has a lot of people that have made this they’re only income. If we have these cubes, I feel like they really need to make larger ones or put five or six in each location where I’m at. I’ve had multiple people tell me that the same people every day who dig through the trash cans will turn in and fill the machines. Again, I have nothing against people recycling and I’m glad that there are options so that people can get food to eat., It’s just frustrating when I also struggle and rely on recycling, can’t walk 5 miles to the closest major recycling center that only cars, this is an option that could help provide money for me to eat, and I can’t even use it because they fill up within a few hours.

Great idea. Horrible execution. They literally cannot keep their machines empty, so it takes 3-4 hours on average to actually recycle a weeks worth of recyclables because you will get to a machine, wait 40 minutes in line at the machine which will fill up before you get a chance to deposit anything, then you check the app and drive to the next machine that is listed as empty but when u arrive you will either repeat the above process or the machine will already be full. In my experience I usually have to visit 6 machines or more before I can actually begin recycling and even then I’ve had multiple times where the machine fills up before I give it all of my recycling which means I start the above process all over again. This business is offering you the ability to turn recycling into a full time job commuting to “pay” $2 for 4 or more hours of mindless wandering because their app doesn’t update fast enough and they fundamentally lack the bandwidth to handle the volume of recycling they are receiving. I’m considering just taping a bag of recycling to their machine and leaving.

The app is slow and the listing of cubes makes no sense. They aren’t in any sort of logical order. I see one that’s less than half a mile away next one is 50 miles, 3rd one is 2 miles away. Favorites don’t show at the top. Can’t filter them at all. Should be able to sort both by distance and by space. Which brings me to my biggest issue. The glass is always full, always! It’s been 3 weeks now that I’ve not seen a single cube in my area not have glass full. Oh and when I have seen one with space I drive there to find someone with a car full of bottles endlessly filling it up. There should be a daily limit on glass returns. The leaderboard shows people in the thousands for the week. How?