Tesla co-founder JB Straubel’s Redwood Materials is to expand its battery recycling operation by commencing production of anode copper foil and cathode active materials. The firm says the two products will become a “closed loop” and that it will be able to reuse all of the lithium, copper, nickel and cobalt that it recovers from old batteries.

Founded in 2017, Redwood Materials has steadily been building a network of partners who donate battery waste for it to recycle. As we reported earlier this year, these include e-bike maker Specialized, but also the likes of Panasonic and Amazon.

The firm points out that the current battery supply chain requires materials to travel tens of thousands of miles before they make it into a final product. It argues that ‘urban mining’ operations such as its own can to a great extent negate this.

“To make electric vehicles and energy storage products fully sustainable and affordable we need to actually close the loop at their end of life,” said a spokesperson. “This means not just collecting and recycling the batteries but also continuing further, fully refining the materials we recover and then manufacturing them back into precision battery materials to use those raw materials again.” 

Once sustainably pre-treated, batteries go through our hydrometallurgical process for refining and purification. Raw materials are then quality verified in our lab before they're returned back into the battery supply chain. pic.twitter.com/Ceec3vr7tu

— Redwood Materials (@RedwoodMat) August 27, 2021

Speaking to the FT, Straubel also highlighted another benefit of this approach.

“With rock and ores or brines, you have very low concentrations of these critical materials. We’re starting with something that already is quite high concentration and also has all the interesting materials together in the right place. So it’s really a huge leg up over the problem mining has.”

Straubel reckons his firm can recapture usable quantities of metals at a lower cost than mining.

Furthermore, he estimates that there are about a billion used batteries, full of valuable materials, lying around US homes in old laptops and mobile phones.

Redwood says it will announce a site for its North American battery materials manufacturing facility early next year. It will be aiming to produce 100 GWh/year of cathode active materials and anode foil for one million electric vehicles by 2025.