River Co. announced that a three-company consortium it leads will begin a demonstration project commissioned by the Ministry of the Environment to sort mixed aluminum scrap by alloy type and reuse it as aluminum for wrought products. The scrap consists of a mixture derived from end-of-life products and metal scrap.
It was disclosed that River Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of TRE Holdings, together with Nippon Light Metal Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of Nippon Light Metal Holdings, and Mizuho Bank, Ltd., had been selected for the Ministry of the Environment's FY2026 commissioned demonstration project. River will serve as lead operator, and the companies will carry out the project jointly.
The demonstration targets mixed aluminum scrap derived from waste. Unlike established collection systems for materials such as beverage cans, it aims to recycle scrap with different origins and conditions domestically into wrought aluminum products by sorting it by alloy type. Preprocessing will begin with wet-density separation, followed by a separation process combining multiple stages of X-ray sorting and a LIBS sorter.
The three priority areas of the demonstration are verifying separation accuracy and determining which wrought aluminum products can use the material through subsequent melting, composition adjustment, and quality assessment; aligning the requirements of recycling sites with those of product manufacturers; and verifying CO2 emissions reductions and the benefits of domestic resource circulation while exploring commercialization prospects.
This is an early-stage initiative exploring the potential of mixed scrap as a domestic aluminum resource from the perspectives of resource circulation and decarbonization, with the aim of creating a route to wrought-product material while reducing dependence on overseas sources.