SK tes opens Virginia plant to recycle e-waste
SK tes, an SK ecoplant subsidiary specializing in recycling electronic waste, finished the construction of an IT asset disposition (ITAD) facility in the U.S. state of Virginia, Wednesday (local time).
ITAD refers to a process of recycling and reusing outdated IT equipment, including smartphones, laptops, PCs and data center servers, after collecting them and deleting data from their memories completely. The process enables outdated IT equipment to be sold as refurbished products or used as materials for electronic components.
SK ecoplant, a construction unit of SK Group, explained that the new plant can process up to 600,000 servers from data centers annually.
The company picked Virginia as the site for the factory, considering that the state accommodates hyperscale data centers of Amazon and Microsoft and that multiple other tech giants and financial institutions are set to build their data centers there.
Even before building the Virginia plant, SK tes was running four ITAD facilities in the U.S.
With those plants, it aims within the next three years to outpace its competitors in processing waste from hyperscale data centers in North America beyond Virginia.
In addition, the recycling firm plans to build additional ITAD plants tailored for data centers in Singapore and Australia by 2026, so that it can process up to 1 million servers every year.
SK tes, which has operations in 23 countries, was chosen by IT market tracker Gartner in 2023 as one of the three companies that can provide comprehensive ITAD services globally, along with Iron Mountain in the U.S. and Sims Lifecycle Services in Australia.
“Synergizing our Las Vegas plant built last year and the newly built Virginia plant, we will dominate the North American market, where 40 percent of global IT assets from data centers are processed,” said Cho Jaeyeon, head of SK ecoplant’s environment business unit.
SK tes was renamed recently as SK ecoplant acquired TES from Singapore’s Navis Capital Partners in 2022.