Despite the growing domestic appetite for aluminum, much of what the country recycles still gets exported overseas, particularly when it’s lumped together with other metals like copper, brass, and titanium. Magnets can easily pull out pieces of steel from scrap piles, but aluminum alloys are tricky to sort. That leaves behind roughly 18 billion pounds of mixed-metal material per year, about 10 billion of which include aluminum alloys, according to Sortera.
“We generally scoop it up, put it into ships, and send it to Southeast Asia,” where the metals are sorted by hand, Siemer said of the industry’s approach. “Or it’s made into low-value products in America, where you can melt the aluminum down” with the other metals, he added, likening the process to melting a box of colorful crayons into a functional, but less desirable, brown soup.
Sortera’s founders, Nalin Kumar and Manual Garcia, launched the company in 2020 to introduce more precision and automation to this sorting process. After spinning out of an Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy program that focused on recycling metals for lightweight vehicles and aircraft, the startup raised money from firms including Chrysalix Venture Capital and the Bill Gates–affiliated Breakthrough Energy Ventures. Sortera said the funding announced this week brings its total investment to about $120 million.
Other early-stage companies are working on new ways to pluck recyclable materials out of the gobsmacking amounts of garbage we generate every day. Greyparrot, for example, has developed AI camera systems that recycling firms can install to track aluminum cans, glass bottles, and plastic packaging as they move down conveyor belts. The startup Amp uses software-driven robotic systems inside its own plants to automatically sort materials.
But Sortera handles only scrap metal, and it hunts for only specific types of high-quality aluminum alloys — ones that manufacturers like Novelis are typically willing to pay more for. The company’s Indiana facility can also process scrap at high enough volumes to justify handling it domestically, Siemer said.
“They’re getting into a really interesting niche,” said Parker Bovée, who leads waste and recycling research for the consulting firm Cleantech Group. “If you can get pure sorted alloys, then you know exactly what you’re dealing with,” which makes the metal more valuable to the companies turning it back into car frames, engine blocks, or complex metal parts.
Bovée said that from an investment standpoint, he considers Sortera’s approach to be higher risk than a software-only solution, since it involves spending more capital to build facilities and machinery. Waste management in general “is a difficult industry to break into and make substantial inroads,” he said. But Sortera’s ability to capture sought-after alloys “makes them very impressive.”
Siemer added that Sortera will eventually use its technology to sort the other metals found in shredded scrap piles. But for now, he said, “We’re building a business on the aluminum.”
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Great Job Maria Gallucci & the Team @ Canary Media Source link for sharing this story.
