Coming out of stealth mode: Redwood Materials
One of the biggest challenges with electric batteries is recycling. A company founded by Tesla co-founder JB Straubel is coming out of stealth mode and announced that they are already recycling scrap from Tesla’s Gigafactory in Nevada.
“I’m looking into the future and seeing this freight train coming at us.” — JB Straubel, CEO of Redwood Materials
Redwood Materials
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) has recently published an interview with JB Straubel, the co-founder of Tesla and architect of the in-depth Gigafactory in Nevada, on a new venture to recycle lithium-ion batteries at scale.
JB Straubel is currently the CEO of Redwood Materials, based in Carson City, Nevada, and is seeking to build the biggest lithium-ion battery recycling facility in the USA. The company tries to shift the dynamics of raw material supply and demand, in order to deal with the increasing volumes of scrap and spent electric vehicle (EV) batteries.
The challenge for lithium-ion battery recyclers can be summarized as following:
- 1) deal with the mountain of waste cells coming in the future
- 2) re-process and sell the parts
- 3) master the chemical processing to make battery-grade material
In the WSJ interview, there were four things revealed:
- In 2019, Redwood Materials launched a trial with Panasonic (Tesla’s battery partner) to recycle scrap materials from their batteries. This trial has been expanded recently. Redwood Materials is currently focusing on refining its recycling process on cellphone batteries before handling electric car batteries.
- In 2020, Redwood Materials raised $40 million from Capricorn Investment Group (founded by Jeffrey Skoll) and Breakthrough Energy Ventures (founded by Bill Gates).
- Redwood Materials currently has about 50 employees and plans to increase that number to 200 by the end of this year.
- Straubel hopes that within 10 years recycling will bring the price of raw materials for lithium-ion batteries down to about half of what it costs to mine them. That would be a game-changer in the industry.
“Forever the entire market has been dictated by the commodity price of these metals. This is a chance to change that whole equation and to realize material cost savings in a way that short circuits that industry.” — JB Straubel
The Wall Street Journal profile mainly revolved around Straubel’s history with Tesla. The article didn’t present the details about the processes that they are developing to recycle the battery materials. We will have to wait patiently for the next update of Redwood Materials.
