The Axia Institute was awarded a Harvest Grant, valued at $5,000, during the NextCycle  Michigan Summer Showcase on June 25, 2025. This grant, sponsored by the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE), is in recognition of the “ReX Your Rx” project pitch delivered by John Hatfield, executive director, and Bahar Aliakbarian, Ph.D., associate professor and senior director of research and development, during the pitch competition.

NextCycle Michigan, an EGLE initiative, is designed to advance businesses and projects that build capacity for material recovery, reuse, and recycling in Michigan. Selected teams receive access to research, mentorship and one-on-one coaching, a multi-day accelerator camp, business planning, pitch development and matchmaking with potential partners and funders. The Showcase is the culmination of the six-month program where teams pitch their projects, vying for awards, seeking investment, and connecting with partners.

The Axia Institute was one of 17 teams selected from 47 applicants for the organic material solutions and recycling technologies tracks. Hatfield and Aliakbarian pitched ReX Your Rx, an initiative that would collect, sanitize and reuse orange pill bottles to an audience of entrepreneurs, small businesses, brands, investors, community representatives, and recycling industry professionals. They highlighted a small pilot conducted at MSU St. Andrews in Midland showed promising results: more than 300 bottles were collected in three months from just 15 employees.

“Our initial idea was to recover, sanitize, and reuse bottles for refilling prescriptions, but during our six months with NextCycle, we learned that FDA regulations require certain medications to be placed in child-proof caps, which made direct pharmaceutical reuse unfeasible,” said Aliakbarian. “Our NextCycle coaches helped us pivot to research new reuse options and we adapted our proposal.”

The ReX Your Rx project offers a comprehensive approach that goes beyond typical recycling and reuse:

• Offering a new service to pharmacies. This service would recover bottles and destroy sensitive data. While pharmacies already contract services for recycling bottles, this added value of data destruction could entice them to switch providers.
• Redefining single-use pill bottles. Axia is researching opportunities that may exist for reuse of prescription bottles for animal clinics and cannabis, and plan to conduct a market analysis for the potential reuse in the nursery and agricultural markets.
• Empowering the local community. This project would create job opportunities for adults with disabilities at the Arnold Center in Midland and leverage local recyclers for more efficient community-wide pill bottle collection.

“The NextCyle experience allowed us to get new perspectives on ReX Your Rx, and at the same time, we saw how several allowed us to learn how other individuals and organizations are going beyond reducing the environmental impact of plastics, but also championing circularity,” said Hatfield.

Axia plans to use the Harvest Grant from EGLE to support additional collection efforts as it continues to secure end-user partnerships.

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ABOUT THE AXIA INSTITUTE
As a premier value chain innovation center, The Axia Institute® is dedicated to improving Healthcare, Food & Agriculture and Advanced Manufacturing value chains through industry collaboration, applied research and education. Established by Michigan State University in 2013 in Midland, Mich., The Axia Institute and its Axia Lab are part of MSU’s Office of Research and Innovation.

More than 30 companies are member partners who align with three industry-specific consortia groups to collaborate and solve grand challenges that would be difficult to resolve alone. Developing sustainable and revolutionary solutions is driven by our expertise in value chain digitization, value chain optimization, traceability, circular economy, packaging design, fundamental R&D, and talent development.