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Steve Chmura

 

Steve Chmura

RePlastic Recycle LLC, St. Croix, United States

Abstract Title:

Recycling-as-a-Service for Island and Remote Communities: AI-Driven Plastic Sorting and Local Manufacturing in the U.S. Virgin Islands

Biography:

Steve Chmura is CEO and co-founder of RePlastic Recycle, based in St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands. With a background in flight nursing and remote operations management, he founded the company to close the plastic-infrastructure gap facing island and remote communities. RePlastic operates a live plastic sorting and manufacturing pilot in the U.S. Virgin Islands, built around its Plastic Intelligence Platform and PIP-Coretex AI sorting technology, and is developing distributed deployments across the Caribbean and other small island developing states.

Research Interests:

Island and remote communities face a structural gap in plastic-waste infrastructure: they collect material but have no local end-market, and the economics push them toward shipping waste off-island as the default. RePlastic Recycle closes that gap with the Plastic Intelligence Platform, a modular, containerized system that sorts post-consumer plastic and manufactures it into construction materials at the point of collection. It is delivered as Recycling-as-a-Service, so a local operator can deploy it at a manageable upfront mobilization cost rather than financing a full plant. This presentation reports on a live deployment in St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands, operational since April 2026. The platform's AI sorting subsystem, PIP-Coretex, currently classifies resin codes 1, 2, 4, and 5 at 97% accuracy using near-infrared and RGB optical paired with a delta-robot pick-and-place stage. Sorted feedstock is washed and extruded into dimensional lumber, pavers, and retaining wall blocks. We will share operational findings from the pilot, including sorting performance by resin type and the practical engineering constraints of running recycling infrastructure in a hot, humid, grid-fragile environment, and discuss the service-based deployment model as a path to scaling distributed recycling across small island developing states where centralized infrastructure has repeatedly failed to take hold.