Sortera wants to 'unlock the scrap' with new funding, second sorting plant

The funding was led by accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates and VXI Capital, with participation from Yamaha Motor Ventures and Overlay Capital; it also received additional equipment funding from Trinity Capital.

“It was really nice to bring on partners that have a very similar vision as where we want to go,” Benjamin Pope, senior vice president of operations and commercial development, told AMU. “It’s a combined vision of sustainability targets, and most importantly, taking advantage of a resource that the US has typically allowed to leave the country for lack of low-cost sortation.”

Sortera uses proprietary technology equipped with AI-enabled multi-sensor sorting systems with blending capabilities to support customer-specific requirements that can replace imported primary aluminum. The company says it is the only one producing end-of-life recycled aluminum products, including 380, 356, 319, and wrought.

Sortera also produces low-silicon wrought packages and polished end-of-life aluminum die cast for direct use in 380 applications. The Markle facility produces materials used in the automotive, construction, and aerospace industries.

The Lebanon, Tenn., facility will mirror the Markle plant and could increase Sortera’s annual production capacity to approximately 240 million pounds, the company said. The new facility will be operational by the summer of 2026.

Unlocking scrap

Moving into its second phase, Sortera’s first goal “is to show the market that our model and our machinery (are) scalable,” Pope said.

The second goal is to dive deeper into the scrap stream.

“Today, we’re producing with tweak and twitch,” Pope said. “Tomorrow we’ll be producing with zorba, tweak, and twitch. What that allows us to do is to increase our procurement from 20-30 vendors to up to a couple of hundred in North America.”

“Talking with the OEMs, as well as the large players in flat-rolled products that partner with the OEMs, they say for sustainability targets they need 70% scrap,” Pope said. “What we do is we unlock scrap that historically could never go to end consumption in the US, because there was not a technology to do it at a high rate of speed – high throughput with high quality. That’s really what the second plant offers; not only ourselves, our investors, but also the market.”

A mixed bag of alloys

Pope gives this example. Growing aluminum usage in vehicles has created a very mixed bag of pieces at the end of life – there’s something like 50-100 alloys within a blend of end of life.

Meanwhile, the metal’s usage in aerospace and construction means other alloys are in the mix.

“The life cycle is different,” Pope said. “For instance, a building could be 50-100 years old when it gets taken down and they pull out the metals that are in that. A car is roughly 10-13 years old. Maybe an airplane is 50 years old. You have this wide array of life cycle of products, which means the scrap we get every day varies quite a bit. So, creating an algorithm that understands which groups of those alloys can be mixed together to create a high-volume, sellable commodity package – that’s the problem that we’re solving, and that was the hardest part of the first stage.”

Sortera is able to produce a 95% or greater quality, allowing consumers to use more scrap, Pope said.

“Generally the scraps were mixed and you could only tolerate whatever contamination was acceptable. But in our packages today, we have a 380 blended package that you can directly melt in a die-cast furnace if you wanted to,” he said.