The number is what the plant produced, not what it took in
Redwood Materials, the battery recycling company founded by former Tesla chief technology officer JB Straubel, says its Nevada campus produced more than 60,000 tons of critical materials last year. The federal Environmental Protection Agency defines a critical mineral as a raw material that is economically and strategically important, carries a high risk of a disrupted supply, and has no easy substitute. Redwood Materials counts lithium, cobalt, nickel and copper as the metals inside its 60,000 ton figure. That number is what the plant turned out after processing, not the weight of batteries or devices it received. Redwood Materials also says it has started a second site in South Carolina, with an initial capacity of about 20,000 tons of the same kind of production a year. The 2 sites combined add up to about 80,000 tons of critical materials a year, a MAOWCE total added from the company own 2 figures.
All 3 figures are Redwood Materials own reported numbers. The combined figure is a MAOWCE total, added from the company own 2 separate figures for its 2 sites, not a figure the company states as one number itself. Nevada is stated as what the plant produced last year, South Carolina as the initial annual capacity at a site that has only just started.
Show the numbers
| Nevada, last year | 60,000 |
| South Carolina, initial | 20,000 |
| Both sites, combined | 80,000 |
The metal is not only coming from wrecked cars
The United States Environmental Protection Agency states that in the near term, batteries from consumer sources, including cell phones and laptops, will make up an important share of what gets sent for recycling. A nonprofit group focused on electrical safety, the Electrical Safety Foundation International, lists phones, kitchen appliances, electric toothbrushes, laptops, bicycles, power tools and headphones among the devices it says already go into the same recycling stream as cars. Tricia Dutcher, a consumer and policy program manager at Redwood Materials, puts a size on the opportunity sitting inside those ordinary devices. Dutcher says Americans discard about 150 million phones a year, and that 166 discarded iPhones hold enough cobalt for 1 new electric car battery pack.
If it has a rechargeable battery, it can go into the bin.
Tricia Dutcher, consumer and policy program manager at Redwood Materials. Source 2.
Most of that material never reaches a recycler at all
The gap is not in how well the material gets recovered once it arrives. It is in how much of it arrives at all. A University of Nevada, Reno news article about the Redwood Battery Bin program states that only 16% of electronics get recycled at all in the United States, a figure given in the same interview as Dutcher own phone counts. Redwood Materials already runs 20 smart recycling bins across Nevada under that program, and separately says it operates more than 150 collection points nationwide, so the small local pilot sits inside a far larger existing network for taking devices back.
Both figures are Redwood Materials own reported counts. The nationwide figure is stated as more than 150, so 150 is a floor, not an exact count.
Show the numbers
| Nevada, smart bins | 20 |
| Nationwide, collection points | 150 |
What happens once a device reaches the plant
Once a device does reach a recycler, the recovery is efficient. The Electrical Safety Foundation International states that Redwood Materials, which it calls the largest battery recycler in North America, recovers more than 95% of the critical minerals in a recycled device and returns them to the supply chain. The federal government names 2 processes used at that scale, smelting, which recovers cobalt and nickel and sometimes lithium, and leaching, which can recover high amounts of cobalt, nickel, lithium and manganese. The message from Redwood, in Dutcher own words, is that the type of device barely matters.