Aluminum is omnipresent in our modern world, but its production comes with a heavy carbon footprint. With Trump’s tariffs driving up prices, we’re reminded that it shouldn’t be wasted—and Iceland may hold the key to its circularity.
That’s an ambitious goal, even though aluminum is—on paper—infinitely recyclable. “In principle, it is true, but it is more complicated than that,” DTE CTO Kristjan Leosson told Fortune.
That’s because aluminum comes in many forms, from airplane wings to building frames. “If you have used beverage cans and you melt them, you don’t make used beverage cans out of that alloy,” Leosson said. “You have to manage all these streams of different recycled aluminum in such a way that you make the highest value end product again.”
That’s where DTE’s proprietary technology can help. With advanced sensors providing real-time data, the young company gives its clients the ability to analyze the composition of aluminum as it is melted down, which makes it easier to incorporate scraps without compromising quality.
This level of precision is especially important as manufacturers work to meet rising demand for high-strength aluminum alloys to be used in sectors like aerospace, defense, renewable energy infrastructure, and semiconductors.
Karl Ágúst Matthíasson, DTE’s co-founder and newly appointed Chief Strategy Officer, offers a helpful analogy to explain this challenge. Speaking to Fortune, he compared aluminum scraps to leftovers: If you taste them actively enough, you could reuse yesterday’s premium lobster soup as stock for the premium soup of the day.
Stretching the analogy further, just as restaurants strive to source ingredients locally, reusing aluminum scrap means relying on a resource that doesn’t have to be imported. It is an argument that carries new urgency in the U.S., as the need to secure access to critical materials—especially those vital to sectors like defense—add up to supply chain pressures.
“In a way, the tariffs are an incentive for the recycling business in the West and everywhere to make recycled aluminum, so it indirectly promotes demand for our product,” said Jakob Asmundsson, a seasoned Icelandic executive who became DTE’s CEO earlier this year.
Just as restaurants strive to source ingredients locally, reusing aluminum scrap means relying on a resource that doesn’t have to be imported.
Indeed, the most common alternative to DTE’s offering—manual sampling of molten metals for testing every now and then—is both wasteful and highly hazardous. It’s no surprise, then, that these dangerous, labor-intensive methods are expected to be steadily replaced by automation.
“In a way, the tariffs are an incentive for the recycling business in the West and everywhere to make recycled aluminum, so it indirectly promotes demand for our product.’
As the U.S. looks to reshore and decarbonize its aluminum supply chains, these Icelandic innovators could play a role by exporting their expertise—not aluminum itself, and potentially sidestep the tariffs brought in by the White House.
“Improving the sustainability of the aluminum industry is a complex task, and is going to require a lot of different elements to solve the problem. And we feel that this technology is one of those elements that can help us get where we need to go,” Prichett said of DTE.
