Redwood Materials spending ‘hundreds of millions’ to speed recycling for EV batteries
Breaking up is hard to do, and in few places is that very true than breaking up and reclaiming the materials in an EV battery. These are big, heavy, complex arrays of materials and packaging that don’t recycle like a water bottle.
Most experts agree that a circular economy — one which takes its waste products and turns them back into new products instead of throwing them in the ocean or burying them in landfills — is a critical component of creating a sustainable planet.
It’s an intriguing enough challenge that former Tesla CTO J.B Straubel left that company to focus on the problem through startup Redwood Materials. The company likes to say “the largest lithium and cobalt mines in the western hemisphere can be found in our country’s junk drawers,” not to mention underneath our electric cars.
Electric vehicles are ideally suited to being part of a circular economy because nearly all of the material in EV batteries can be recycled to make new batteries that are as good as or better than the originals.
Recently, Redwood Materials announced that it is launching a new program that is designed to give anyone with an EV easy access to its battery recycling facilities.
Ford and Volvo have both signed on to participate in the program, which aims to make EV battery recycling easier for the people who may be in possession of end-of-life EVs. Redwood Materials says, however, that it will accept any lithium-ion or nickel-metal hydride (NiMH) batteries from all EVs and hybrids coming off the road.
The company says it will work directly with dealers and dismantlers in order to identify and recover end-of-life battery packs and keep their materials out of the scrapyard. Redwood will start by offering the service in California and will safely package and transport the batteries to its facility in Northern Nevada where it will recycle them.
“We will demonstrate the value of end-of-life packs today and how we can steadily improve those economics as volumes scale up,” the company wrote in a statement. “Ultimately, our aim is to create the most effective and sustainable closed-loop system that physics and chemistry will allow for end-of-life battery packs to re-enter the domestic supply chain.”
Recycling the materials in batteries is important since mining them is often a difficult and dirty task. It has been noted that manufacturing batteries make producing EVs more carbon-intensive than making internal combustion engine vehicles, so finding ways to reduce that carbon cost will be crucially important to make EVs truly green.
“We are excited to be strengthening our partnership with Redwood Materials in identifying solutions for electric vehicle batteries that have reached the end of their useful lives,” said Ford president and CEO Jim Farley. “This new program with Redwood Materials will help Ford lead America’s transition to sustainable and carbon-neutral EV manufacturing and ultimately help make electric vehicles more environmentally responsible and affordable for our customers.
Sources:
- https://youtu.be/bB-eFc1KWmc
- https://cleantechnica.com/2022/05/17/hydrovolt-the-largest-battery-recycling-facility-in-europe-begins-operations/
- https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/why-electric-car-battery-recycling-matters-as-much-as-the-cars-themselves/
- https://www.carscoops.com/2022/02/ford-and-volvo-join-redwood-materials-push-to-make-ev-recycling-as-easy-as-possible/
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2021/06/14/redwood-materials-spending-hundreds-of-millions-to-speed-recycling-for-ev-batteries/?sh=781f17c97b64
- https://us-east-2.console.aws.amazon.com/polly/home/SynthesizeSpeech
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