Editor’s note: Electronics recycling will be featured in sessions at the 2026 E-Scrap: The Longevity Conference Oct. 26-28 in New Orleans.
A string of ownership moves in North American electronics recycling has followed a pattern that has picked up speed in the past year. Sumitomo Corporation of Americas took an equity stake in GreenTek Solutions, a Texas-based ITAD provider focused on data center hardware. Mitsubishi Materials Corp invested in Elemental USA E-Waste & ITAD. Korea Zinc, which already holds majority stakes in Igneo/PedalPoint and Kataman Metals, is now building a smelter in Tennessee designed to process 13 different metal types from recycled and byproduct feedstock. In the past year alone, three foreign industrial groups have each moved into the same layer of the US recycling chain: origination, the companies that collect and process end-of-life electronics before material moves downstream.
The pattern has an earlier version worth noting. In 2021, Japanese trading house Sojitz Corporation acquired a minority stake in TES-AMM Japan K.K., the Japan arm of a major global ITAD and e-waste recycler. In 2023, Sojitz partnered with JX Metals, one of Japan’s leading copper smelters and refiners, to invest in eCycle Solutions, Canada’s largest e-waste and ITAD collector and processor. JX Metals described ITAD at the time as a new business field for the company, and named Sojitz’s North American operating experience as the reason the two firms were entering it together. That deal involved a minority stake in a Canadian company rather than a majority position in a US one, a distinction worth keeping in view. But the underlying mechanism is the same one now showing up in the more recent US deals: a Japanese refiner securing a position in the origination layer that feeds its own downstream processing, through a trading house acting as its North American partner.
South Korean capital’s presence in this sector predates the recent wave. SK ecoplant, the environmental affiliate of SK Group, acquired a 100% stake in TES, now rebranded SK tes’ for $1 billion in a deal signed in February 2022, giving it ITAD and e-waste processing facilities across the US, including sites in Virginia, Georgia and Washington State, with continued expansion since.
None of these deals is unusual on its own. What’s less commented on is what happens when you look at them together, across several years and set them next to what industry sources describe as a persistent pattern: precious metals recovered from US circuit boards still get refined almost entirely overseas, principally in Japan, because domestic permitting and processing scale can’t yet absorb that volume.
Put those facts side by side and a shape starts to form. Material has been flowing out of North America for refining for years, through ordinary trading relationships. What looks new is ownership following the same path: foreign groups are buying into the companies that generate that material in the first place, not simply buying the material itself. JX Metals and Sojitz did this first, in Canada. Sumitomo and Mitsubishi Materials appear to be following a similar logic in the US more recently, securing feedstock access while leaving the actual refining step in Japan. We expect more similar announcements in the months to come. Korea Zinc is going a step further, building refining capacity onshore in Tennessee while also owning the origination layer that feeds it, the most direct instance of this pattern to date.
Why now: some speculation
Japan and South Korea have essentially no domestic mining base, and firms like Mitsubishi Materials, JX Metals, and Korea Zinc have built decades of business around processing imported and secondary material rather than mined ore — recycled-metals recovery is closer to an inherited survival strategy for them than a new trend. These same firms already operate refining capacity that depends on steady feedstock, and buying equity in origination companies is a more secure way to lock that in than relying on spot-market trading relationships alone.
Government policy may be reinforcing the pull: the Japan-US Critical Minerals Framework and a March 2026 Joint Fact Sheet from Japan’s METI and MOFA both point toward Tokyo encouraging Japanese firms to invest in allied-nation materials supply chains, a posture that traces in part to Japan’s own experience with Chinese rare-earth export restrictions in 2010.
It’s also fair to weigh more mundane explanations: Sumitomo, Mitsubishi, and Sojitz are general trading houses that take minority stakes across dozens of unrelated sectors as a matter of ordinary business, and Japan’s long stretch of low interest rates gave these firms comparatively cheap capital for outbound acquisitions during much of this period.
These explanations aren’t mutually exclusive, and distinguishing a coordinated materials-security strategy from routine trading-house behavior would take further reporting.
If that reading holds, it raises a question current US critical-minerals policy doesn’t obviously answer. The major policy levers in this space — Project Volts, CHIPS- and IRA-linked onshoring incentives, “friendly nation” sourcing requirements for OEMs and defense contractors — are built around geography: where material gets mined, processed and refined. None of them, as far as this observation goes, distinguishes between domestically processed and domestically owned. A smelter built in Tennessee satisfies the letter of an onshoring policy focused on physical location. Whether it satisfies the intent of a policy meant to reduce dependence on foreign-controlled supply chains is a separate, and so far unasked, question.
This is a more important matter in critical materials than in most other sectors. The entire policy rationale for onshoring rare earths and related materials is supply chain security, alongside economic development. If the point of reducing reliance on foreign-refined material is to avoid a scenario where a foreign government or foreign-aligned company could constrain US access to defense- and technology-critical inputs, then foreign ownership of the domestic processing infrastructure built to solve that problem would seem to be at least worth examining. This holds even where the ownership in question comes from allied nations like Japan and South Korea, and not from adversarial ones.
It’s also worth noting what this is not. There’s no evidence here of anything improper, and allied-nation investment in US and Canadian industrial infrastructure is routine and, in most cases, welcomed as a source of capital and technical expertise that the domestic industry may not yet have on its own. JX Metals, Sojitz, Korea Zinc, Sumitomo and Mitsubishi Materials are established, credible operators. They are not opportunistic outsiders. No wrongdoing is implied here. The point is a specific policy question — ownership versus geography — that doesn’t appear to have been asked clearly in public, at least not in connection with the ITAD and e-scrap sector specifically.
A useful contrast comes from elsewhere in the industry. Some US-based recyclers, backed by domestic capital rather than foreign strategic partners, have been building their own downstream critical-materials processing capability through joint ventures with domestic technology partners, rather than relying on, or selling into, a foreign-owned pipeline. Whether that approach positions those companies as a genuine domestic counterweight to the pattern described here, or simply as one strategy among several pursuing a similar goal through different ownership structures, is a fair question for further reporting. This piece raises that question; it does not settle it.
What would move this from observation to reporting: confirmation of whether any of these ITAD or e-scrap deals have gone through CFIUS review, and a clear answer from someone inside Commerce or DoD on whether foreign ownership of domestic critical-materials processing infrastructure is tracked, or weighed, any differently than foreign-owned mining or extraction assets. Until then, this stays at the level of an observed pattern that has not been reported out fully.
