We’ve all heard of the slogan “reduce, reuse, recycle.” Well, what about disposable packing materials like plastic foam? How can you reuse discarded foam material without even having to reach the recycle point? Ryan Antenucci is committed to figuring out just that. The USC Iovine and Young Academy alumnus is the founder of Coralite, a company devoted to making high quality material from foam waste. The business is not only a sustainable step in the right direction for repurposing waste creatively, it’s an amalgamation of Antenucci’s childhood theories, academic enterprises, and lifelong passions. 

Antenucci has explored a fascination with materials for as long as he can remember  – collecting them, manipulating them, and figuring out how to make the most of them. Raised in Colorado surrounded by the great outdoors, he’s been drawn to fabrication and manufacturing since he was a little kid tinkering in his parents’ garage. That interest led him to the Academy and ultimately to his pursuit today as a recent grad. An avid surfer, the Coralite concept occurred to him when he witnessed the excess board waste in the surfboard production practice and wondered, “what can we turn that back into?” Now the idea has expanded beyond surfboards, and he’s scrutinizing the reusability of a larger scope of foam materials, establishing how to turn those into a secondary material outside of its foam origins. Coralite’s objective is to do that cleanly and effectively through a sustainable process. 

"It’s not recycling in the traditional sense where you take a material, you need it perfectly purified, and you bring it all the way back to the very basic material it is and then you try to rebuild the material from what it was. That can be a very intense laborious process that takes up a lot of energy, time, greenhouse gas, and money,” Antenucci explains. “My mission statement from the beginning has been simple solutions of reuse, rather than recycling. There’s that hierarchy of reduce, reuse, recycle. Reuse is supposed to be before you actually go to recycling. That’s what we’re talking about,” he says. For Antenucci, it’s all about “facilitating a circular economy.”

The sustainability side of Coralite’s quest aligns heavily with Antenucci’s ideals. A lover of nature, from the ocean to the mountains (he also spearfishes and snowboards), he strives to contribute positively to the environment by “mining real value” from existing foam waste that wasn’t produced with decomposition in mind. He sees usable purpose in non-organic materials like expanded polystyrene (EPS) foam, where others see disposability. 

“Creating that third life for it is kind of our background mission statement. I believe that can be applied to multiple other materials and different ways of restructuring them. We can reuse this foam in a creative, different way and we can target completely different applications before it can then go to be recycled,” Antenucci says. Coralite is giving new meaning to the term, “waste not, want not” when it comes to foam. 

Coralite is a natural endeavor for an experimenter like Antenucci. At just nine years old he started playing around with materials like EPS foam to derive how it could be reformed and restructured. When the ideas that sparked Coralite came to him as an adult, he remembered the covert operations from his garage days. It’s a full-circle effort that echoes his deep-rooted desire to resurrect materials in a whole new way. 

Attending the Academy was a no-brainer academic move for the perpetual problem-solver within Antenucci. He admits he wasn’t a technical whiz when entered the halls of Iovine and Young Hall (“I barely touched computers before the Academy”), but he learned from his peers and classes and got into the mindset of how to understand that world and relate to people in that space. He also perfected his fabrication skills. Remodeling a perfume bottle into a vintage lighter during a successful freshman year project “confirmed something in his head” about his future in repurposing. Coralite was fostered during Antenucci’s Garage Experience senior capstone project a few short years later. 

Antenucci also says the Academy helped him examine how “ideas can scale and grow.” In addition to his drive to repurpose, he’s had a mushroom foraging business since high school. He doesn’t sell mushrooms quite like he used to, but the affection – and enduring lessons from the art – are still there, nurtured by the Academy ethos. He brings that wisdom to Coralite. 

“I know how to collect things. When I’m trying to find foam, collecting foam is one of the biggest issues, and I’ve been able to build a collection system that makes sense. I think the general knowledge in the space from diving into all the mycelium material helps me understand my bio-based competitors,” he shares. 

“I can now see other potentials than just the material in this company,” he adds of how his Academy education informs his company’s capabilities. “I can see how this can adapt to different models and different technologies.”

These days, Antenucci is probing the potential applications of the repurposed foam material he’s developed. The possibilities range from construction materials to products to aesthetically-minded design elements. 

“Once we go from a structural material or a general purpose construction material to a much more refined interior design material, I think that would be a longer term path. I would love that, I would love it to be used as design tiles and wall paneling,” he shares.  

As Antenucci discovers Coralite’s potential power, his – and a more sustainable – future holds seemingly endless promise. He’s surely come a long way from his grade school experiments, but it’s clear his innate innovation and awe for the power of materials lives on in everything he uses (and reuses, of course). 

We’ve all heard of the slogan “reduce, reuse, recycle.” Well, what about when it comes to a widely-used substance like foam? How can you reuse discarded foam material without even having to reach the recycle point? Ryan Antenucci is committed to figuring out just that. The USC Iovine and Young Academy alumnus is the founder of Coralite, a company devoted to making high quality material from foam waste. The business is not only a sustainable step in the right direction for repurposing waste creatively, it’s an amalgamation of Antenucci’s childhood theories, academic enterprises, and lifelong passions. 

Finding Purpose in Repurpose: An Alum Gives Foam a Second Life