A Leaner Redwood Bets on the Grid
Redwood Materials, the battery recycling company built by Tesla co-founder JB Straubel, has cut dozens of jobs. Bloomberg reported in late November that the layoffs ran across the company this month, as the startup walks back some of its most ambitious projects and refocuses on one promising market: grid-scale batteries.
The cutbacks are a course correction, not a retreat from the underlying idea. That idea, laid out in a Grist profile of the company’s Nevada operation, is that America’s retired batteries are an ore body sitting above ground, and that reclaiming them beats digging new holes.
The Field of Dead Batteries
At Redwood’s facility, rows of dead batteries cover some 30 acres of high desert, boxed and covered against the Nevada sun, waiting to be shredded into what the trade calls black mass. The company says it handles roughly three-quarters of the lithium-ion batteries recycled on American soil at the largest such site in the country, recovering better than 95 percent of the lithium, along with cobalt, nickel and other metals.
The mining math is what drives Straubel. The world pulls about 180,000 metric tons of lithium out of the ground each year, Grist notes, and demand is projected to reach nearly ten times that level by 2050 as electric vehicles, storage and green-transition technology multiply. Known reserves at that pace last about 15 years, and cobalt’s runway is shorter still.
“Recycling is going to plug that gap,” Beatrice Browning, a battery recycling expert at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, told Grist.
Straubel’s Long View
Straubel’s obsession predates Redwood. His path ran through Tesla, where he was the first chief technology officer after co-founding the automaker in 2003, and where he built the company’s first domestic battery plant, Gigafactory Nevada, and watched mineral demand climb as US electric vehicle counts quintupled after 2020. Consultancy Circular Energy Storage expects the global pool of retired batteries to grow tenfold by 2030, the journalism outlet reported.
Speaking in 2023, Straubel put the philosophy plainly: “need to be planning ahead and really keeping an eye toward what that future looks like, to be ready to recycle every one of those batteries,” he said, adding: “The worst thing we could do is go to all this destruction and trouble to mine it, refine it, build the product and then throw it away.”
The numbers so far are real if modest. Last year, by the company’s account, it recycled 20 gigawatt-hours of batteries, equal to roughly a quarter million electric cars, and booked $200 million in revenue. The Energy Department’s Brian Cunningham describes the broader stakes in similar terms: “There is this race in terms of EV recycling that people are trying to capitalize on,” the battery research program manager said, because robust supply chains “in the long term” will lean hard on recovered material. China, with a decades-long head start, is the one to catch.
Sources
- Tesla Co-Founder Straubel’s Battery Startup Redwood Fires Dozens – Bloomberg
- Mining is an environmental and human rights nightmare. Battery recycling can ease that. | Grist
