Sortera opens second Tennessee plant, doubling scrap-sorting capacity to 240 million pounds.

For decades, the United States shipped its mixed aluminum scrap overseas and called it waste. What nobody wanted to say aloud was that it was also energy: the embodied carbon and processing heat that had already been paid to make the metal in the first place. Michael Siemer, chief executive of Sortera Technologies, put it plainly — the country has been exporting both the metal and the work already done to make it, because no sorting technology could separate the alloys efficiently enough at scale to keep the economics from falling apart.

Sortera is a company most investors have never heard of, and most aluminum executives have only started to notice. Its pitch is direct: turn that exported waste stream into a domestic supply line, and sell it to manufacturers who are running out of domestic options. With a second processing facility now operational in Lebanon, Tennessee, the company has doubled its annual capacity to approximately 240 million pounds, The Robot Report reported.

The Tennessee plant is Sortera's second location. The first opened in Markle, Indiana in early 2023, spanning 200,000 square feet. The company closed $45 million in funding late last year from T. Rowe Price, VXI Capital, Yamaha Motor Ventures, and Overlay Capital, with separate equipment financing from Trinity Capital, specifically to scale operations and capture a significant portion of the 4 billion pounds of scrap aluminum the U.S. has been shipping abroad.

The core technology uses artificial intelligence to sort mixed aluminum by alloy type — the kind of task that sounds mundane until you realize how hard it is to do reliably at the scale of a steel shredding operation. The system can sort eight to 16 different alloys in one pass, achieving throughputs of five to eight tons per hour at 98 percent purity minimum, according to Waste 360, and does so using approximately 95 percent less energy than virgin aluminum production. That energy figure matters on a factory floor: producing new aluminum from bauxite is electricity-intensive enough that a typical smelter runs like a small city. Sorted and remelted scrap carries a fraction of that upfront cost.

The question is what domestic buyers do with that supply. U.S. aluminum consumption was just under 12 million tons in 2024, against a structural demand gap of about 4 million tons, Waste 360 reported. New rolling mills — the facilities that turn sorted ingots into sheet and plate for aerospace and automotive customers — are coming online in 2025 and 2026 into that gap. That is the market Sortera is building toward: manufacturers who need domestic aluminum and cannot source enough of it from established mines and smelters.

The raw material is not the constraint. Almost 25 million tons of automotive shredder metal scrap is produced in the United States every year, according to Sortera's own site, and the infrastructure of dealers, shredding operations, and export terminals developed to handle that flow over decades is already in place. What changed is whether someone can sort it cleanly enough, cheaply enough, to redirect it away from those export routes and toward domestic buyers who will pay a premium for alloy-specific stock they can trace back to a specific facility.

Sortera says it has achieved 95 percent accuracy in sorting mixed aluminum scrap, Recycling Today reported, and is working to scale operations to capture a significant portion of the 4 billion pounds of scrap aluminum that currently leaves the country for processing abroad. The Lebanon facility's 240 million pound annual capacity represents a step toward that scale — but it is also a small number against the export problem it is meant to address. The gap between where Sortera is and where the supply chain nationalism thesis needs it to be is not a technology question. It is a commercial and logistics question, the kind that gets answered by building relationships with scrap dealers, signing toll-processing agreements with mills, and demonstrating to automotive procurement teams that the alloy chemistry is consistent batch after batch.

The company is betting that as domestic demand tightens and export routes become less attractive, the answer becomes yes. The structural deficit Sortera is selling into — 4 million tons of annual shortfall, new mills coming online, manufacturers actively hunting for traceable domestic supply — is real. Whether a sorting company most people have never heard of can build the commercial relationships fast enough to matter before a competitor demonstrates comparable economics is the open question the next 18 months will answer.