What Redwood Materials processes today
Redwood Materials, a battery recycling company founded in 2017 by JB Straubel, the former chief technology officer of Tesla, says it takes in and processes more than 20 gigawatt hours of used batteries a year. A gigawatt hour measures how much energy a battery can store, and 20 gigawatt hours of used batteries a year is roughly the same amount of battery material that went into about 250,000 electric vehicles, according to TechCrunch. An independent industry publication restated the same figure the same week. Redwood Materials also says that volume amounts to more than 70% of all used or discarded battery packs in North America.
The first bar is what TechCrunch reports the company is already doing. The other 2 bars are targets Redwood Materials has stated for later years, not measurements of anything that exists yet.
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| Processed today | 20 |
| Target for end of 2025 | 100 |
| Target for 2030 | 500 |
What actually comes in
Most of what Redwood Materials recycles today is not old batteries pulled from retired electric cars. A battery expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a science group independent of the company, described what actually flows into the recycling stream now.
Right now, the recycling market is mostly manufacturing scrap, consumer electronics, and EV batteries that have failed under warranty.
Jessica Dunn, a battery expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists. Source 1.
What comes back out
Once batteries arrive, Redwood Materials breaks them down and recovers the metals inside so they can be reused in new batteries, rather than mined again from the ground. A peer reviewed study in the journal Nature Communications, built on the company own 2021 operational data, measured how much of each metal actually comes back out. It found a 95% recovery rate for nickel and for cobalt, and 92% for lithium, the 3 metals inside a lithium ion battery that carry the most value to recover. The recovered metals are supplied back to battery makers such as Panasonic and other customers, rather than sent to a landfill.
Figures are from a peer reviewed study built on the company own 2021 operational data, not a figure the company states about itself.
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| Lithium | 92 |
| Nickel | 95 |
| Cobalt | 95 |
How that compares with mining
The same study compared recycling batteries this way with mining the same metals fresh from the ground, and found recycling cuts environmental impact by at least 58%. For batteries that had been used inside vehicles, recycling used 77.1% less energy than mining, produced 57.7% less carbon dioxide, the gas that traps heat and warms the planet, and consumed 72.2% less water.
Figures are for batteries that had been used inside vehicles. The same study found even larger reductions for manufacturing scrap, a separate stream this article does not use.
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| Energy used | 77.1 |
| Carbon dioxide | 57.7 |
| Water used | 72.2 |
The targets ahead, not yet measured
The 20 gigawatt hour figure is what Redwood Materials is already doing, not a plan for later. The same TechCrunch article that carries it also states 2 company targets. Redwood aims to manufacture 100 gigawatt hours a year of finished cathode and anode material, the manufactured layers that store and carry charge inside a new battery, by the end of 2025, and 500 gigawatt hours a year by 2030. Those targets are tied to a Nevada factory campus that a 2 billion dollar loan from the United States Department of Energy Loan Programs Office is helping fund, and a site in Berkeley County, South Carolina, where the state governor office says the company investment reaches 3.5 billion dollars and will create 1,500 jobs.