Continued progress in reusing and recycling used electronics has SK Tes more than halfway to its 2030 asset repurposing goal, according to the company’s 2025 sustainability report.
The Singapore-based ITAD company reported more than 127 million kilograms (about 140,000 tons) of material was processed at its 40-plus global locations last year, including US sites in Georgia, Virginia, Washington and Nevada.
That puts the company at 565.27 million kilograms (about 623,000 tons) of material collected since 2021, when the company pledged to repurpose 1 billion kilograms (about 1.1 million tons) of material by 2030. The 2025 number is down 6% from the year before, but company leadership said SK Tex remains on track to reach the 2030 target.
The company managed to keep more material out of landfills in 2025, boosting its reuse, recycling and recovery rate from 97.95% to 99.82%. That includes selling or recycling all of the IT devices, batteries, black mass and circuit boards it processed. SK Tek processed 2.59 million items last year, with laptops (689,000) and printers (359,131) leading the list. The company also managed to keep 99% of the plastic it processed out of landfills while recycling 100% of its paper and appliances.
“Every additional kilogram we process represents material diverted from disposal and returned to productive use,” CEO Jin Mo Lee said. “Managing sustainability well is not a defensive exercise. It is a competitive one. It supports growth and innovation, creates value for our customers, and helps us manage risks and build long-term resilience.”
Lee said the company is building that resilience amid the expected boom in AI- and data center-related equipment that will hit the marketplace in the coming years; some estimates have global data center demand tripling by 2030.
Leadership said SK Tes is ready to handle the increased volume of equipment resulting from high turnover rates at these facilities. The high-value components disposed of by these facilities should lend themselves to circularity, but care has to be taken to ensure material recovery is efficient in machinery that is more complex and harder to integrate into other systems.
These same high-value components and minerals have resulted in more legislative action in the US and other nations to keep those materials on shore. As a global company that exports and imports material, SK Tes has to be ready to handle current and future requirements, which may include measures such as tracking advanced processing chips.
“We are adapting our facilities, capabilities and systems to process increasingly complex equipment at scale, recover high-value components and materials, and provide customers with the data and transparency needed to understand the environmental outcomes of their technology decisions,” Lee said. “Our role is not simply to manage the equipment that AI leaves behind. It is to help build a more circular and resilient technology ecosystem.”
The company’s capabilities were bolstered by expansion in 2025. A facility opened last fall in Ireland that’s focused on ITAD- and data center-based items. SK Tes also announced plans last year to open a battery recycling plant that, when open, will be able to process 1,000 metric tons of lithium-ion batteries per year. Earlier this year, the company expanded services at its Virginia facility to accommodate more mobile hard drive shredding, part of its goal to build more data destruction capabilities in the US; a shredding site also opened in Australia earlier this summer.
SK Tes is a wholly owned entity of SK Ecoplant of South Korea and opened in 2005.
