Trash Technologies, which recovers and recycles critical metals, announced an equity funding round on 20 August. According to a report in the Nikkei, it secured ¥200m (about $1m).
The company was founded in 2023 and is headquartered in Tokyo.
Using AI to make sure the metals sleeping in the urban mine are recovered
Buildings, cars, electronic devices: products that use metal are all around us. If the metals in those products can be recovered and reused, a country poor in natural resources can make new metal goods even as it cuts its imports, which serves economic security. Metal resources of this sort, sitting in circulation in society, are known as the “urban mine”.
Japan is very much one of those resource-poor countries, and recovering and reusing metals from the urban mine is nothing new there.
Trash Technologies, too, recovers, refines and reuses gold, silver, copper and rare metals from the urban mine. One thing that sets it apart from what has gone before is the purity of the material it produces. On its website the company says it can recycle to a specified purity of 99.99%. Behind that claim lies the AI-based sorting it applies to electronic devices and circuit boards once they have been collected.
The company also supports the digital product passport (DPP) introduced by the European Union, which allows resources to be traced. High purity plus traceability means the recycled material is also used in jewellery. According to the same Nikkei report, sales of recycled material for jewellery are due to begin during August.
Trash Technologies’ other lines of business include the safe processing of lithium-ion batteries, the shredding of storage media after data erasure, and the manufacture and sale of products made from recycled silver under the name “Eternal Silver”.
A circular model “Japan can be proud of”, says the chief executive
Three venture-capital firms and Minoru Moriya, an entrepreneur, took part in the August round.
The money will go towards research and development, building and relocating plant, implementing the DPP, and hiring.
Tsuyoshi Kibe, Trash Technologies’ chief executive, said: “We will keep rising to the challenge of achieving an urban-mine circular model that Japan can be proud of — one that circulates the resources sleeping in Japan using Japanese technology and connects them to the next industry.”
