Alumni Business Spotlight: Zach Agostine, Founder of reShape PlasticWorks

I graduated from Champlain in 2014 with a degree in Marketing. In 2020 I started a business called reShape PlasticWorks, where I am the sole proprietor. I do everything from manufacturing to marketing, supply chain management, and administrative things like applying for grants, and just trying to improve the business as I see fit.

What struck me during the college tour process was how excited students were to be at Champlain. I visited on an Accepted Students Weekend and everybody that I talked to felt so happy, excited, and passionate to be there and working on what they found meaningful.

reShape PlasticWorks is a micro recycling business that collects processes and sells 100% recycled plastics from community waste. Plastic comes from the community, is transformed locally, and is sold within a 50-mile radius.

Since graduating, I’ve been working in tech. Champlain helped me land my first job, doing testing for video games, and then that evolved into different roles over the years. I think that the biggest thing to come out of that was realizing that I have a hard time sitting at a desk and doing eight hours of computer work. That craving of working on something tangible eventually led me to start reShape.

In 2020, I was working in a bike shop in North Carolina. This was after lockdown when everyone was desperate to get outside, so people were buying bikes like crazy. When the bikes got shipped to the store, they were shipped with single-use plastic. The lot didn’t accept mixed-use recycling so it ended up getting thrown away.

I wanted to learn why it wasn’t being recycled and see if there was something I could do about it. I started collecting the plastic and doing research and found that it’s super easy to recycle plastic. Every time I worked with it I got a little bit better. I got new ideas and then that success kept compounding until I got to a point where I realized this is potentially the basis of a business.

The classes at Champlain really helped me approach my processes and develop a brand identity I feel good about. Understanding that the processes I implement on the manufacturing side of things are going to inform the story that I tell about the product. With the humanics approach of the Core, I really wanted to make sure that I was doing that responsibly and authentically.

I would love to do reShape full-time, both the production side of things, but also looking into ways to reduce plastic waste in other ways. In my research, I’ve realized that the problem can’t be solved with just recycling. So, also reducing the hard-to-recycle plastics and building community resilience to lessen the dependence we have on this material.

Part of the narrative that I’m trying to build for these products is the practicality and usefulness. So that it’s not just a fun thing that you buy on a whim and then just gets recycled when you realize that the only thing you can use it for is holding onto your keys.

One project I’m working on is using reShape carabiners in gardening efforts. I currently use the carabiners to contain my raspberry plants. They are hooked to a pole that keeps them contained and growing in the direction I want them to. The carabiners can also support squash and other heavy vegetables on a trellis so that you can build natural shape in your garden and create different growing spaces to maximize the land.

First, of course, is keeping plastic out of landfills and off the beaches. It is a drop in a drop in a bucket compared to the global plastics industry, but it’s also nice to look at my work after a couple of years and see how every step led to more and more plastic being recycled.

From a production standpoint, it’s the motivation to get better at my craft and experience the reveal. Having an idea or a thesis, even as simple as, if I mix these colors, what it’s going to look like, then getting something completely different and kind of being amazed or impressed, and using that to inform how I move forward. It is like wrapping a present and also being the one to receive it.

Don’t be afraid to explore or go on completely wild paths. This business got off the ground because I had access to a lot of tools that I maybe didn’t know I needed. My makerspace journey started with taking classes, and part of this was just for a different experience from working a 9 to 5 at the desk all day. Utilizing makerspaces and learning woodworking enabled me to make my first molds, experiment, and explore working with plastic. It was a stepping stone that led me here.