JB Straubel will perhaps always been known as the co-founder and the former CTO of Tesla. His new startup which has been working stealth is called Redwood Materials. It has been working on a process for recycling materials with a focus on electric car batteries. It has already announced that it has garnered $700 million in funding and now it has announced plans for what it will do with the funding.
"Redwood's mission is to create a circular supply chain for electric vehicles and clean energy products, that make them more sustainable and drive down the single most expensive component: batteries. We've shared a lot about our recycling work, which is certainly a core component of the battery sustainability equation, but is only the tip of the iceberg for Redwood," said the company announced plans for a massive new factory.
Redwood Materials will create battery materials in the US supplying batteries to cell manufacturers with anode copper foil and cathode active materials.
Straubel has been working on reinventing battery recycling
"We plan to transform the lithium-ion battery supply chain by offering large-scale sources of these domestic materials produced from as many recycled batteries as available and augmented with sustainably mined material. These two products re-use all of the lithium, copper, nickel and cobalt that we already recover from old batteries! These materials will be built from more and more recycled batteries every year but in the immediate future, we need to ramp EV production faster than the number of existing EVs will reach end of life and therefore, be available for recycling. This is the only way we can scale these critical building blocks to meet the US's 2030 electrification goals," added the company.
Redwood Materials will announce a site by 2022 for its North American manufacturing which will scale to 100GWh per year in capacity for cathode active materials for one million electric cars by 2025. By 2030, it expects the capacity to ramp up further to 500GWh per year which would be enough to power 5 million EVs which would be close to half of the engine US annual automotive production.
As of now Redwood Materials operates out of Nevada and there is potential in Straubel tapping Teslas as one of the potential clients.
