Tanaka Precious Metals — a Japanese group that produces and recycles materials used in electronics and semiconductors — is looking to build an end-to-end precious metals circular economy in Malaysia as it seeks to localise more of the supply chain for materials used in the semiconductor industry.

The company already produces bonding wire in the country, with a manufacturing presence in Penang for more than 30 years. However, its recycling and refining loop still largely runs through Japan.

This means spent materials, used products and production scrap from Malaysian customers are collected and sent back to Japan for recycling and refining. These include items such as used bonding wire and production offcuts that still contain recoverable gold and other precious metals. The recovered metals are then reused in its products before being supplied to customers.

Yasutaka Ihara, director, corporate officer and head of sales management at Tanaka, says recycling capacity for precious metals in Malaysia is limited. The company deals with gold and silver, alongside the platinum group metals and other materials used in semiconductor applications. “In Malaysia, no refining company exists in terms of precious metals,” he points out.

Tanaka wants to be the first in Malaysia to provide that capability, although the company is currently unable to announce a specific timeline.

The longer-term goal is to create a domestic closed loop in the country, says Ihara. Instead of requiring customers to export scrap to Japan and then import the recovered or newly produced materials, Tanaka wants to build a local supply chain where scrap collection, refining, production and customer supply can take place in Malaysia.

Unlike companies that only do refining, Tanaka, which is both a refiner and a manufacturer, can take spent products from customers, recover the precious metals and feed the reclaimed gold or other metals directly into its own production process.

Ihara says the challenge is not ordinary refining, but the ability to refine precious metals to the high purity levels required for semiconductor applications. Some companies are only able to refine precious metals to “3-9” purity, or 99.9%.

However, semiconductor applications require higher levels, such as “4-9” (99.99%) or “5-9” (99.999%) purity. This level of high-purity refining is difficult and can only be done by a few companies, he says.

There are three key technical areas behind Tanaka’s precious metals recycling process.

The first is sampling. Scrap material is not consistent and the precious metal content can vary significantly from batch to batch. Thus, sampling technology is important to accurately determine the metal content in the scrap, says Ihara.

The second is recycling and refining. Waste streams usually contain a mixture of metals, including precious metals, as well as other materials such as copper and iron. Tanaka’s proprietary technology allows it to selectively separate precious metals from the others and refine them into high-purity materials, he says.

The third is analysis. Precious metals are expensive and semiconductor applications require high levels of purity, so detailed and precise analysis is needed throughout the process, says Ihara.

Other Japanese companies into circular economy and alternative fuels

According to Japan External Trade Organisation (Jetro) Kuala Lumpur managing director Koichi Takano, many Japanese companies are collaborating with Malaysian players on green transition solutions. These include circular and carbon-recycling solutions, where technologies convert waste or emissions into useful products.

This can be seen in projects like CHITOSE Carbon Capture Central Sarawak (C4 Sarawak), which captures carbon emissions and converts these into microalgae biomass for potential use in fuels and other applications, he says. C4 Sarawak is a 5ha industrial microalgae production facility developed through a collaboration between Sarawak Energy Bhd, the Sarawak Biodiversity Centre and Japan-based CHITOSE Group.

Another example is bio-based and sustainable fuel solutions, such as those produced by Japanese company Euglena, which develops biofuels from microalgae and biomass. Euglena is working with local partners on biofuel production and feedstock development, particularly for sustainable aviation fuel and resource recycling, says Takano.

“This shows Japanese companies are not only bringing technology, but also working on the ground with local ecosystems, which is key for scaling in countries like Malaysia and further beyond to the Asean market,” he adds.

Jetro works with a range of ecosystem partners to support this process. These collaborations help test and validate technologies in real Malaysian conditions before scaling, opening up local networks of industry players and infrastructure owners, and refining business models for Malaysia and the region.

Swedish companies, backed by carbon pricing since 1991 and an emphasis on environmental governance, are developing technologies such as wave-energy systems and green-hydrogen-based steel production. CorPower Ocean is developing systems that can turn ocean waves into electricity, while Hybrit and Stegra are using green hydrogen instead of coal in iron and steel production.

These kinds of technologies can find a deployment base in Malaysia, given the country’s long-standing industrial relationship with Sweden, says His Excellency Niklas Wiberg, the ambassador of Sweden to Malaysia. Sweden’s 97 manufacturing projects in Malaysia, worth RM7.77 billion, provide a base from which more cleantech solutions can be introduced for real industrial use, he adds.

However, bringing these technologies to Malaysia will require significant investment, long-term horizons and stable policy frameworks, says the ambassador.

“Technologies developed for Nordic climates must be adapted to Malaysia’s tropical conditions. Incentive structures also play an important role because governments need to make sustainable choices more attractive than business as usual,” he points out.

This applies to cleantech from other countries as well. The challenge is not only whether the technology works, but whether it can be deployed in Malaysia’s climate, infrastructure and policy environment.

For instance, Engie, a global energy and services group headquartered in France that provides low-carbon electricity solutions and energy infrastructure such as district cooling, says the core solutions it deploys are broadly similar across markets, but the implementation in Malaysia would differ from that in France.

Engie is offering renewable energy and energy-efficiency solutions in Malaysia. For instance, its BKH Solar project, a 42MW Large-Scale Solar project developed under the Corporate Green Power Programme, allows STMicroelectronics to access renewable electricity through long-term power purchase agreements. The France-based company is also working with Sunway Property on district cooling, initially serving four buildings in Sunway Square and then expanding to eight Sunway education facilities.

In Europe, deployment must often account for seasonal heating and cooling demand. In Malaysia, the constant need for cooling means the focus shifts more heavily towards efficiency, predictive maintenance and keeping energy infrastructure operating well over the long term, says Jacques Boonen, Engie’s managing director of local energy infrastructures for Southeast Asia.

“While the core cleantech solutions Engie deploys are broadly similar across regions, the implementation in Malaysia differs significantly from that in France. In Europe, seasonality factors often require balancing heating and cooling demands,” he says.

“In contrast, Malaysia’s tropical climate places sustained emphasis on cooling efficiency, predictive maintenance and maintaining long-term performance of critical infrastructure. This shapes not only how technologies are deployed, but also how operations are managed to optimise performance over time.”

Finland has a strong engineering and innovation culture, backed by government grants and loans that help technology companies develop industry-reshaping solutions. Two companies that have come out of this ecosystem are RiverRecycle and Tracegrow.

Tracegrow recovers valuable metals from spent batteries and other industrial waste, turning these into micronutrient fertilisers for farming. The company’s recycling technology began with black mass from spent batteries, which still contains valuable trace elements after use. Many batteries sit unused in drawers, go to landfill or are burnt, a waste of significant raw material value.

“The starting point was a simple but powerful question: After decades of extracting minerals from the earth, could those materials be recovered and given a second life instead of being lost as waste?” says Tracegrow CEO Jaakko Nauha.

Meanwhile, RiverRecycle intercepts plastic waste in rivers before it reaches the ocean, then recycles the low-value plastic into boards that can replace wood and other virgin materials. The company was born of a simple observation that most ocean plastic pollution starts on land and travels through rivers.

“For years, the global conversation focused heavily on cleaning beaches and oceans, while relatively little attention was given to intercepting waste upstream before it reaches the sea,” its CEO Anssi Mikola points out.

RiverRecycle began with a single river cleaner, which is a machine to stop floating waste before it reaches the ocean. But the company soon found that nobody was willing to pay for such machinery and that river plastic was usually considered non-recyclable.

The breakthrough came from realising that creating value for that material could fund financially sustainable river protection systems, says Mikola. The company now recycles the low-value plastic it collects into durable boards that can be used in place of plywood, cement or virgin plastic, giving the waste a commercial second life while funding the clean-up operations.

For RiverRecycle, operating internationally from a small country whose own rivers were already clean, forced the company to think globally from the outset, says Mikola. It quickly recognised that the biggest impact would come in rapidly urbanising countries where waste management systems are still developing.

“In countries like Malaysia, we would likely establish a local operating entity together with local partners, combining river interception, land-based collection systems and local recycling capacity. The key is always localisation, building systems that fit the economic, social and environmental realities of each country while maintaining scalable core technologies and operational models,” he says

For Tracegrow, building the company in Finland had its own advantages. A widely shared emphasis on efficiency and reducing waste made industrial collaboration easier and lowered the threshold for partnerships.

“At the same time, Finland’s active battery sector helped strengthen cooperation across the ecosystem, connecting universities, research institutes, mining companies and circular economy start-ups,” says Nauha.

French companies are bringing their long-standing water and waste management expertise to Malaysia, with global players such as Veolia Water Technologies already active in the local industrial water and wastewater treatment sector. Veolia’s projects in the country include a wastewater treatment and recycling system for TRX City in Kuala Lumpur, wastewater treatment plants for industrial clients in Banting and Bangi, Selangor, and an airport wastewater treatment plant, also in Selangor.

Water management is also an important part of how data centres are designed and operated. Veolia’s data centre solutions include direct-to-chip liquid cooling and cooling water treatment. In the US, the company is working with Amazon on a system that treats wastewater so it can be reused for data centre cooling.

French companies also focus on data centre solutions that prioritise energy efficiency, waste-heat recovery and sustainable cloud infrastructure. These include liquid and immersion cooling for high-performance computing, edge computing infrastructure and power-grid partnerships that provide low-carbon electricity for energy-intensive facilities.

“France’s green goals for data centres are among the strictest in Europe. Driven by the goal to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, operators face legally mandated energy reductions, strict limits on waste heat and aggressive requirements for renewable energy to support both standard cloud infrastructure and growing artificial intelligence workloads,” says Jean-Francois Ambrosio, director of Business France Malaysia.

Another area of French expertise is rare earths. France was one of the first countries to develop rare earth separation technologies, and that expertise is now being brought to Malaysia through the partnership between Malaco Mining Sdn Bhd and French rare earth refining and recycling specialist Carester.

Canada’s nuclear capabilities could become relevant to Malaysia if the country moves closer to adopting nuclear energy as part of its long-term power mix, says Her Excellency Jodi Robinson, the high commissioner of Canada to Malaysia.

Nuclear was one of the areas covered, alongside oil, liquefied natural gas and renewable energy, when the Ministry of Energy Transition and Water Transformation and Natural Resources Canada signed a letter of intent to strengthen energy cooperation during Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s visit last October.

Canada has decades of nuclear experience. Its nuclear sector is built around the Canada Deuterium Uranium (CANDU) reactor technology, which is used for electricity generation and has supported nuclear research and isotope production. The country is also home to organisations such as the Canadian Nuclear Laboratories, its national nuclear research body, which carries out reactor research, manages nuclear waste and produces isotopes used in medical diagnostics and cancer treatment.

“Canada’s nuclear supply chain and regulatory expertise, along with the medical isotope capabilities of Canada’s CANDU nuclear reactors, are relevant if Malaysia advances nuclear options for electricity and domestic isotope production,” says Robinson.

In the immediate term, she points to water technologies, such as pipeline leak detection, as an area where Canadian expertise could help Malaysia meet its non-revenue water goals. Other strong use cases include industrial water reuse pilots, wastewater upgrades and energy-efficiency retrofits, she adds.

Canadian involvement has so far taken the form of demonstration projects, pilots and commercial partnerships that have improved water reuse rates, reduced operating costs and strengthened environmental monitoring.