Sunnking Sustainable Solutions President Adam Shine has been named a finalist for the Electronic Circular Innovation Award — a brand-new honor from the E-Scrap Conference recognizing the people and organizations driving reuse, repair, refurbishment, and recycling forward across the electronics industry.
It's the first year this award has existed, and Adam is one of a small group of finalists nationwide being recognized for their applied work.
Adam's nomination centers on his leadership in positioning Sunnking as an active industry partner in a growing portfolio of advanced recycling and circular-economy research — work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, the REMADE Institute, Idaho National Laboratory, and university researchers across the country. Rather than serving simply as a source of material, Sunnking brings real-world recycling operations into the research process itself: providing feedstock, operational data, equipment access, pilot testing, and a pathway for promising technologies to eventually be deployed at commercial scale.
That work spans several fronts:
Automated disassembly and battery safety: As lithium-ion batteries show up in more consumer devices, the risks that come with mishandling them — including fires at processing facilities — have grown alongside them. Sunnking is working with research and industry partners on automated systems that identify devices and safely remove batteries before conventional shredding. One related project has already demonstrated automated cellphone disassembly at roughly 120 phones per hour with 98.9% precision — about 20 times faster than manual processing — reducing safety risk while recovering valuable materials before they're lost in downstream recycling streams.
Recovery of critical minerals and rare-earth materials: In partnership with the Department of Energy and university researchers, Sunnking is helping evaluate how changes in shredding and material liberation can improve recovery of high-value metals and critical minerals from post-shred electronics — contributing actual recycling feedstock and operating data so researchers can test not just whether a process works in a lab, but whether it can function inside a high-volume commercial facility.
Advancing recovery of plastics, metals, and solar components: As solar panels and other emerging technologies reach end-of-life at scale, the industry needs better ways to recover the materials inside them. Sunnking's research portfolio extends into plastics separation, solvent-based recycling technologies, and solar-panel circularity — helping researchers understand how products can be designed differently up front to enable better material recovery down the line.
Across these programs, Sunnking increasingly serves as the bridge between laboratory innovation and industrial deployment — helping answer the question that comes after a promising lab result: can this actually work inside a commercial recycling operation processing millions of pounds of material? It's the kind of work that doesn't happen without a genuine, sustained partnership between industry and applied research — exactly what the REMADE Institute, Idaho National Laboratory, and DOE bring to the table.
The Electronic Circular Innovation Award is new this year, but the E-Scrap Conference itself is the largest annual gathering of the U.S. electronics recycling and ITAD industry — bringing together processors, ITAD firms, material traders, equipment manufacturers, and the people making decisions about how e-waste gets handled at scale. Being recognized within that community means something.
The winner will be announced at the 2026 E-Scrap Conference, held October 26–28 in New Orleans.
Adam's nomination reflects work that's been years in the making — the kind of collaborative research that doesn't always get public attention but ends up shaping how the entire industry operates down the line. Recognizing that publicly, through an award built specifically for this kind of contribution, is a meaningful first for the field.
Voting for this year's finalists is open through Friday, September 18. If you'd like to support Adam and see the full lineup of nominees, cast your vote before the deadline. https://www.e-scrapconference.com/electronic-circular-innovation-award
Want to learn more about Sunnking's role in advancing the circular economy — including our ongoing partnership with Rochester Institute of Technology and the REMADE Institute — visit sunnking.com/enterprise or reach out directly.
