Most conversations about the future of US manufacturing focus on familiar territory: semiconductors, batteries, critical minerals, and the reshoring of supply chains disrupted during the last decade.
A quieter but potentially significant conversation is happening a layer below that, around the technologies that turn waste streams back into raw materials. And one of the technologies drawing renewed investor attention is cold plasma.
Eric Wood, a longtime Carolinas developer and founder of Mooresville-based Old Well Co., has spent the bulk of his career building residential communities across North Carolina and the broader Carolinas. His firm’s expanding position in RJ Renewables, a company building scalable cold plasma systems for materials recovery and manufacturing, reflects a thesis he has been developing for some time.
“The next wave of US manufacturing is not only about making new things,” Wood says. “It is about recovering what is already in the system. Cold plasma is one of the few technologies that can do that at commercial scale.”
What Cold Plasma Actually Does
Cold plasma is an ionized gas generated at near-ambient temperatures, which allows it to interact with materials without the heat load of traditional thermal processes. In industrial applications, that property makes it useful for breaking down complex waste streams, activating chemical reactions, and recovering usable compounds from materials that would otherwise be landfilled or incinerated.
The appeal, from a capital standpoint, is that it sits in an unusual overlap. It is a materials recovery technology, an environmental compliance technology, and a manufacturing input technology at the same time. That combination is rare, and it changes how the opportunity can be sized.
Why US Infrastructure Is Ready for It
Three macro trends are converging to make cold plasma commercially relevant in a way it has not been before.
First, landfill economics are deteriorating. Tipping fees have risen steadily, siting new facilities has become politically difficult, and states across the Southeast, including North Carolina, are running out of long-term capacity. Any technology that meaningfully reduces landfill volume now has a clearer path to contracted revenue.
Second, manufacturers are under pressure to secure domestic inputs. Supply chain disruptions, tariff volatility, and customer demand for recycled content have created a market for recovered materials that did not exist at the same scale five years ago.
Third, regulators at the state and federal level are tightening rules on what can be released, stored, or transported, particularly around emerging contaminants. Processes that can neutralize or transform those compounds have a compliance value independent of their economic output.
Why a North Carolina Developer Is Paying Attention
It is a fair question why a career North Carolina homebuilder is investing in plasma physics. Eric Wood’s answer is practical.
“Every community I have built over thirty years, including every one across North Carolina, has a back-end problem,” he says. “Waste, water, runoff, materials. The more communities you build, the more visible those problems become. At some point you stop treating them as someone else’s category and start treating them as investment.”
From that vantage point, RJ Renewables is less a speculative bet on a novel technology and more a logical extension of the infrastructure conversation Eric Wood has been having for years in North Carolina. Cold plasma, in this view, is one of the tools that allows the next generation of growth markets to operate without exporting their problems to someone else.
The First Plant
RJ Renewables has targeted the launch of its first US facility as a proof point. The goal is not just to demonstrate the technology but to demonstrate the economics at a scale that can attract follow-on capital and industrial partners.
“The first plant is the hard one,” Wood says. “Once the unit economics are visible, the conversation changes. Capital gets easier, siting gets easier, and the category starts to mature.”
For investors watching the space, RJ Renewables is one of a small set of companies working to move cold plasma from academic and pilot-scale applications into commercial operations. How that first facility performs will shape how seriously the category is taken for the rest of the decade.