A burned battery pack from a Tesla Semi is shipped to Redwood Materials’ processing plant in Nevada.
Redwood Materials
Redwood Materials, a battery recycling and components maker created by Tesla cofounder JB Straubel, has added electric vehicle packs that have been damaged by fires and floods to the range of products it’s recovering to reuse the high-value metals contained within to make new lithium-ion cells.
“With batteries proliferating in cars and homes and on the grid and everywhere else, it doesn’t have to be an environmental mess at their end of life or in a disaster or a flood or whatever it might be,” Straubel told Forbes. “There are some good solutions to recover that material and make sure it doesn’t impact the environment any more than the natural disaster did in the first place.”
The Carson City, Nevada-based company has focused mainly on recycling battery packs and scrap materials from auto dealers, electronic waste recyclers and companies such as Panasonic that produce cells. But there’s a growing need to deal with batteries damaged by natural disasters. Redwood was called in by the U.S. EPA to assist with the recovery of burned EV packs after a wildfire devastated Lahaina, Maui, last year and recently worked to remove and recycle a massive battery pack when a Tesla Semi truck crashed and burned in California in July. The company said it’s monitoring damage in the Southeast caused by Hurricane Helene, and what could happen in Florida from Hurricane Milton. It’s prepared to help recover storm-damaged vehicle batteries there but is waiting until initial rescue and cleanup operations are complete.
Surprisingly, nearly all the lithium, copper and nickel within the battery cells can still be reused, even after severe weather events trash the vehicles they’re in, said Straubel, who’s also a member of Tesla’s board.
JB Straubel, cofounder and CEO of Redwood Materials, at the company’s battery recycling and manufacturing facility in McCarran, Nevada.
Emily Najera/Bloomberg
“We can recover more or less the same percentages – it’s in the high 90s – of all those critical materials even after a fire or a flooding event,” he said. “The materials largely don’t leave the battery pack. Even in those cases where there was something like a fire, it may look dramatic, but the battery itself is still largely sitting there intact even though it may be burned.”
Developing this particular expertise comes as the number of electric cars, plug-in hybrids, hybrids and stationary battery storage units expands and weather-related disasters increase as a result of climate change. Global supplies of high-value metals used in battery packs have generally tightened, so the ability to recover and reuse those materials, particularly at domestic U.S. manufacturing facilities, is growing in importance. Closely held Redwood, which has raised about $2 billion to expand its recycling and production operations in Nevada, South Carolina and Germany, estimates it currently recycles about 70% of spent lithium-ion cells recovered in the U.S. That’s about 20 gigawatt-hours of material–enough to make new battery packs for more than 250,000 EVs a year.
Straubel declined to detail how much revenue the company generates currently, though it’s “well north” of $100 million a year, he said.
Road accidents involving hazardous materials, including damaged lithium-ion packs, have more than doubled in the past decade, according to a CBS News report. Add in weather-related problems and it’s likely to be a growing source of damaged packs for the foreseeable future. Keeping them out of landfills is critical, but it’s also something that didn’t factor into Redwood’s initial operations.
“It is definitely exceeding what we expected and wasn’t something we really planned on, but it is a pressing need,” Straubel said.
“This is responding where we see problems and where we see needs for education or recovery and solutions. There hasn’t been much out there for people in a lot of these cases. The products are relatively new and even the local governments don’t really have a playbook yet. They’re trying to figure out what’s the right response and who can even help in these cases.”
Redwood Materials’ processing facilities in McCarran, Nevada.
Redwood Materials
