Redwood MaterialsThe battery recycling startup, founded by former Tesla co-founder JB Straubel, will recycle production scrap for batteries that go into General Motors electric vehicles.
The company announced on Thursday that it is working with it. Altium CellsJoint battery manufacturing venture between GM and LG Energy Solution to recycle cathode, anode and cell scrap from both their Warren, Ohio and Spring Hill, Tennessee facilities.
Battery recycling is a hot industry as automakers and battery manufacturers seek to control their battery material supplies rather than rely on China, the global leader in this field. Incentives are growing in the US and abroad in regions such as Europe to recycle and domestically produce critical battery materials such as lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese and graphite.
President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, signed in August 2022, provides a tax credit For battery manufacturing and critical minerals processing. Redwood directly benefited from the passage of that bill in February 2023, when the Department of Energy awarded the startup a $2 billion loan to build its own. battery recycling facility in Nevada. The DOE has also given Ultium Cells a $2.5 billion loan To develop its own cell manufacturing facilities in the US
The runway to actually recycling EV batteries is long, as most of those batteries are being made today and won’t reach the end of their life for many years. That’s why deals like this one with Ultium to recycle scrap are so important. Redwood – who also has deals Toyota And PANASONIC (which makes batteries for Tesla), has already become a household name in EV battery recycling, but any startup in this field needs a near-term strategy to remain profitable long term. it occurs.
And scrap production is no small feat. A spokesperson for Redwood told TechCrunch that the average battery factory generates 5% to 10% scrap, which means Redwood handles about 10,000 tons of material annually—the equivalent of a daily truckload of scrap.
The company said Redwood will recycle Altium’s scrap and process it into high-quality battery material, which will then be supplied back to cell makers in the form of domestically produced anode and cathode components.
Processing materials – not just recycling them – is also part of Redwood’s long-term strategy, as the price of materials fluctuates regularly. The big money will come from processing materials, which today are typically sent to Asia for processing and then back to the US
In August 2023, Redwood raised $1 billion To expand its battery recycling facilities, with one goal being to increase anode copper foil and cathode active material production capacity. The company said at the time that it expected to produce about 100 gigawatt-hours of annual capacity of cathode active material and anode foil by 2025, which could power 1 million EVs. By 2030, Redwood hopes to increase production output to 500 GWh per year, which could power 5 million EVs. The company hasn’t confirmed if that timeline is still accurate.
Ultium Cell’s two facilities that will supply scrap to Redwood are each 2.8-million-square-foot operations that are expected to produce more than 80 gigawatts of combined battery cells annually, and Redwood says it needs that scrap. Will receive the majority share. Altium also partners with Canadian in 2021 Battery recycling firm Li-Cycle to recycle scrap, but GM has not confirmed whether that deal is still going on. Altium is also in the process of building a third facility michigan.Redwood did not say whether it would also receive scrap from that factory.
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