Redwood Materials, created by Tesla co-founder JB Straubel, focuses on recycling lithium-ion batteries for products such as EVs and consumer electronics. They also supply those recycled raw materials, like copper and lithium, back to its partners that make the batteries, creating what the company calls a 'circular supply chain', that is aimed at reducing the environmental footprint and cost of batteries.

Next year, Redwood Materials is going to start domesticating another part of the currently far-flung supply chain, with plans to manufacture battery materials, including anode copper foil and cathode active materials, at home in the U.S. To do all this, the firm has raised over $820 million to date from investors, valuing the company at nearly $3.8 billion. Redwood’s next ambition: By 2025, it aims to produce cathode materials for battery cells totaling 100 gigawatt-hours per year, enough to supply over 1 million EVs.

Below are some key materials and chemicals they currently focus on (but they constantly expand this list):

• Lithium: Lithium Metal and Lithium Carbonate.
• Nickel: Nickel Metal and Nickel Sulfate.
• Copper: Copper Metal and Copper Foil.
• Gold: Gold Metal and Gold Grain.
• Silver: Silver Metal and Silver Grain.
• Cobalt: Cobalt Metal and Cobalt Sulfate.
• Tin: Tin Metal and Tin Solder.
• Palladium: Palladium Metal and Palladium Circuit.
• Tantalum: Tantalum Metal and Tantalum Capacitor.
• Neodymium: Neodymium Metal and Neodymium Magnets
• Carbon: Carbon and Graphite Powder.

Redwood accepts phones, laptops, tablets, power tools, electric toothbrushes, wireless headphones and any other rechargeable device with a lithium-ion battery. Devices may be dropped off or sent to: Redwood Materials in Carson City, Nevada.

Recycling through Redwood’s consumer program is intended for residents only. Businesses and organizations must work through their business division.

Redwood Materials is an advanced technology and process development for materials recycling, re-manufacturing, and reuse.

Redwood’s technology can recover on average 95 percent of materials like nickel, cobalt, copper, aluminum, lithium and graphite in a lithium-ion battery.

All Batteries & Electronics Waste *Electric Vehicles: *With nearly 100 million cars made annually and nearly 2 billion vehicles on the planet, the amount of materials in the future EV fleet, and the environmental impact at end of life is enormous. Redwood Materials will be ready with solutions at the right scale to help make sure no EV batteries end up improperly disposed of and, instead, will turn this problem into a valuable materials stream returning to the battery production supply chain.

*Grid/Renewable Storage: *Transitioning the worlds electricity to renewable sources requires storage and is already becoming a major market for batteries. This could likely become a battery market larger than the entire EV market and will require robust end of life solutions and management. Redwood is working with project developers, utilities and businesses to plan project recycling solutions into up-front contracts. They will offer solutions for residential storage products at their end of life either directly with consumers or working with installers and contractors.

*Manufacturing: *They work directly with manufacturing partners to turn what is often a disposal cost liability into a revenue recovery steam by quickly and efficiently returning as much value as possible back into the supply chain. This work reduces the battery and EV manufacturing cost and further accelerates their adoption.

*Consumer Electronics: *The electronics market for cell phones, laptops, power tools, smart watches, data centers and countless other battery-powered devices is already creating massive amounts of scrap products. With lifetimes much shorter than EV’s these devices find themselves in the waste stream far sooner. This creates a challenging environmental problem. Redwood sees the significant opportunity to apply their technology at scale to recover materials from small consumer devices in the same way that we recover materials from EV batteries. They have the ability to recover value from both the electronics components (gold, copper, silver, tin, etc.) and the battery materials (lithium, cobalt, nickel, etc.)