Tennessee Materials Marketplace

The Tennessee Materials Marketplace (TMM) is a collaboration between the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation and the US Business Council for Sustainable Development. The TMM is an online, interactive platform that serves as a matchmaker to facilitate beneficial end-use opportunities across industrial sectors. The marketplace aims to find new solutions for challenging wastes and by-products and uncover new and emerging markets for recyclable commodities. Staff from the Division of Solid Waste Management and the Office of Policy and Sustainable Practices promotes the TMM through education and outreach to potential platform users.

Tennessee Materials Marketplace users represent businesses and organizations at every stage of the circular economy - from collection and processing to manufacturers making new goods with recycled materials. The Materials Marketplace can be used as tool for companies to explore real-time data on waste and by-product materials and make decisions on infrastructure and process investments; or as a tool to help find new solutions for hard-to-recycle materials. Our users include:

TMM is an initiative inspired by the TDEC 2025 Solid Waste Plan and and is the core action step taken to support Objective 3: Promote Material Processing and End Use in Tennessee. To date, there are over 100 companies and organizations using the platform in Tennessee - including marquee Tennessee industries, Tennessee Green Star Partners, schools, nonprofits and universities.  Transactions facilitated by the Materials Marketplace by the Materials Marketplace have redirected 100s of tons of materials into higher and better use. This includes a first-of-its-kind end-market connection between a major US electronics recycler and a Tennessee tile manufacturer that’s currently diverting 40,000lbs/week of material, a transaction for over 50,000lbs of excess bulk material from an aluminum casting facility, and more.

More information on the marketplace can be found at https://go.materialsmarketplace.org/.

For technical assistance or facilitation of certain materials to specific markets related to the Tennessee Materials Marketplace and the circular economy, please contact Vaughn Cassidy. Vaughn works primarily with Tennessee industry to assist with repurposing and reuse of discarded materials. He can provide technical assistance and industry contacts throughout the state to facilitate material reuse, recycling or repurposing, including limited assistance with logistics and regulatory requirements. 

For further assistance with recycling vendors and markets in Tennessee, please contact Larry Christley.