Photo: Redwood Materials

Redwood Materials, an American battery recycling company led by the co-founder and former chief engineer Tesla J.B. Strobel, has launched a plant in South Carolina. About this company said on Thursday, November 6.

With the new plant, the company plans to extract up to 20,000 tons of critical metals such as cobalt, lithium, nickel, and copper from old batteries annually.

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According to Redwood, approximately 90% of all lithium-ion batteries produced in North America pass through the company's facilities. Its Nevada plant produced more than 60,000 tons of critical materials last year.

Photo: Redwood Materials

The company claims to be the only major domestic source of cobalt and produces as much nickel and lithium as the largest mines in the US.

Redwood was founded in 2017 to recycle electric vehicle batteries and produce materials such as cathodes and copper foil for anodes.

In 2022, the company stated that it plans to produce enough materials to produce one million electric vehicles a year by 2025 and 5 million by 2030. It is, by data Bloomberg, had agreements with Ford, Toyota, Volvo, etc.

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However, the commercial cathode production plant in Nevada, which was scheduled to open in 2024 and was supposed to produce 100 gigawatt-hours of battery components, is still under construction.

Although Redwood had planned to expand copper foil production at both plants, it has discontinued production in Nevada and no longer plans to do so in South Carolina.

According to Strobel, the bulk of the critical minerals his company produces are supplied to customers outside the electric vehicle sector.

Redwood has also launched a new division called Redwood Energy, which turns worn-out electric vehicle batteries into large-scale energy storage systems.