Pocket Pal: A Portable Trash Can for Your Backpack
Year 1 (2025-26)
by Caden Jackson
Small, portable trash can, designed to conveniently fit in the side pocket of your backpack, giving you an easy way to dispose of small items throughout your day.
About This Idea
Pocket Pal is a removable insert that transforms the underutilized water-bottle pocket on a backpack into a functional side compartment for temporary waste storage.
Students and commuters generate small amounts of trash throughout the day, such as wrappers, receipts, gum, tissues, and cups, but trash bins are not always nearby. As a result, waste often ends up stuffed into pockets, left on desks, or dropped on the ground. Pocket Pal provides a clean, leak-resistant place to store trash until it can be properly disposed of, helping reduce litter while keeping backpacks organized.
The insert slides directly into a standard backpack bottle pocket, holds a disposable liner bag, and can be easily removed and rinsed for reuse. It is lightweight, durable, and designed to fit most backpacks without requiring any permanent modification, making it accessible for students, commuters, and travelers alike. By turning space that already exists on nearly every backpack into a practical storage solution, Pocket Pal makes responsible waste disposal convenient, portable, and effortless.
Beyond individual users, Pocket Pal also creates opportunities for partnerships with schools, universities, corporate campuses, and event organizers seeking cost-effective ways to reduce localized litter and promote responsible disposal habits. By repurposing an overlooked feature of one of the world’s most common everyday items, Pocket Pal transforms backpacks into portable waste-management solutions, making everyday sustainability simple, scalable, and easy to adopt.
Where Did This Idea Spark at WMU?
Pocket Pal sparked at Western Michigan University during an engineering design course where our team was challenged to identify a real, everyday campus problem and build a physical solution around it. Like most WMU students, we were constantly moving between classes, labs, and meetings, often carrying small pieces of trash with no trash can in sight. Wrappers, receipts, and cups would end up stuffed into pockets, left on desks, or dropped simply out of inconvenience. That daily frustration made the problem feel personal and unavoidable.
We began asking a simple question: what if the trash can came with the student? That idea led to Pocket Pal, an insert designed to use the space students already carry on their backpacks. The concept was later accepted into a business accelerator program, where we refined the design, validated the market need, and explored how Pocket Pal could grow beyond campus into a scalable product system with broader sustainability impact.
Impact in Kalamazoo
If Pocket Pal succeeds in Kalamazoo, students, residents, local businesses, and the city all benefit. WMU, KVCC, and local schools would see cleaner campuses as students gain a simple, portable way to manage everyday waste between buildings. Downtown Kalamazoo, festivals, and public events could experience reduced litter, lowering cleanup costs and improving the appearance of shared public spaces. Local organizations and event coordinators could also partner with Pocket Pal to distribute branded units that promote sustainability while supporting community pride. By encouraging responsible disposal habits in daily routines, Pocket Pal helps build a cleaner, more environmentally conscious Kalamazoo while demonstrating how small design solutions can create measurable local impact.
How Investment Helps
Funding would allow us to take Pocket Pal from prototype batches to our first real production run, something that is difficult to accomplish as a student-led startup working with limited resources. Most of the investment will go toward manufacturing, materials, and tooling so we can produce our first large inventory order, along with packaging and shipping supplies. A portion of the funding will also support early campus marketing efforts, testing adoption, and gathering real feedback from students in Kalamazoo. Patent search and provisional filing will help us protect the design while we begin scaling.
Our first local milestone will be launching a Kalamazoo campus pilot, placing our first production batch directly into the hands of hundreds of WMU-area students through campus partnerships and events. Reaching that milestone means we will have real users, real feedback, and clear proof that Pocket Pal can make a visible impact on keeping Kalamazoo campuses and public spaces cleaner.
What I'll Do With the Money
Most of the funding will go toward producing Pocket Pals for the first year, including materials, manufacturing, tooling, and testing to move beyond small prototype runs (about $48,000, or 64%).
We’ll also use funding for shipping and packaging, covering boxes, labels, and fulfillment materials for local distribution and early customers (around $6,000, or 8%).
Another portion will support marketing, mainly campus promotions, content, and small ad campaigns to reach students (about $10,000, or 13%).
Finally, funding will go toward a patent search and provisional filing to protect the design, along with a small buffer for prototyping and startup expenses (about $12,000, or 15%).
About the Founder
We, Caden Jackson, a civil engineering student, and Justin Plankenhorn, a mechanical engineering student, are engineers who enjoy solving everyday problems through creative design. We built Pocket Pals to make a simple improvement students can use daily, and now is the right time for us to scale our tested concept into real-world use while we still reside on campus.