CARSON CITY, Nevada, July 9 — The technical reality of the electric vehicle revolution is that a lithium-ion battery does not last forever. What happens to it when it dies is the question JB Straubel has spent the better part of a decade trying to answer. Straubel, the American engineer who co-founded Tesla in 2003 and served as its Chief Technology Officer until 2019, left the electric carmaker to build the infrastructure for what comes next.
In 2017, he founded Redwood Materials, based here in Carson City, Nevada. The company’s core business is recycling lithium-ion batteries and recovering the critical materials inside them: lithium, cobalt, and nickel.
As of 2023, the facility processes 6,000 tons of batteries annually. The detail that matters is that Straubel is not simply running a disposal service. Redwood Materials supplies the recovered materials directly back to battery manufacturers, including Panasonic and Tesla.
This is the circular economy in practice — the same metals that powered a vehicle can be extracted and fed into the production line for the next one.
The Scale of the Problem
Straubel’s timing looks prescient. The global EV battery recycling market is projected to reach $35.1 billion by 2031. That is a lot of spent cells, and the current recycling capacity is a fraction of what will be needed.
Redwood Materials has raised over $1 billion in funding to address that gap, including a $775 million Series D round in July 2021 led by T. Rowe Price.
In 2022, the company announced a $2 billion expansion to build a battery materials campus in Charleston, South Carolina. That facility is designed to take the operation beyond recycling and into the production of cathode materials and anode foils — the components that go into new batteries.
The Policy Dimension
Straubel has been a key advocate for the circular economy in the battery supply chain, and he has taken that argument to Washington. In March 2022, he testified before the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. The message was straightforward: the United States cannot afford to ship its spent batteries overseas or bury them in landfills when the materials inside them are strategically critical.
He holds a B.S. in energy systems engineering from Stanford University. That technical background is evident in how Redwood Materials approaches the problem — not as a waste management issue but as a materials supply chain challenge.
What to Watch Next
The South Carolina campus is the next big milestone. As EV adoption continues to grow, the volume of spent batteries will rise sharply. Redwood Materials is positioned to be the primary processor for that stream, but the technical reality is that scaling from 6,000 tons annually to the hundreds of thousands of tons that will be needed is a monumental engineering challenge.
Straubel’s wry observation about the whole enterprise is that the battery industry spent decades optimising for performance and cost, but never for recyclability. He is now building the infrastructure that should have been there from the start.
