Construction in progress at Redwood Material's battery materials campus at Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center in April 2022.
By Rob Sabo Special to the NNBW
Friday, April 29, 2022
Redwood Materials of Carson City leased 815,000 square feet of new industrial space at Victory Logistics District in Fernley, but that mega-warehouse is but a small part of the company’s Northern Nevada operations.
Redwood Materials, founded in 2017 by Tesla co-founder JB Straubel, recycles and remanufacturers lithium-ion batteries and consumer electronics. The company is building a battery materials campus on 100 acres at Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center near Tesla’s Gigafactory where it will extract copper, lithium, nickel, cobalt, tin and other key elements from batteries and recycled consumer electronics such as cell phones, laptops, smart watches and other devices that are powered by batteries.
Alexis Georgeson, Redwood Material’s vice president of communications and government relations, told the NNBW in an email that the Fernley location will be Redwood’s warehouse and logistics facility. The TRIC campus, meanwhile, will house the company’s hydrometallurgy recycling operations and produce large-scale sources of domestic anode and cathode materials, which are the negative and positive electrode components that are essential for battery operation, the company noted in a press release on its website.
The TRIC campus will be part of a fully closed loop that will drive down the costs and environmental footprint of electric vehicles, Georgeson said.
“Redwood is aiming to produce 100 gigawatts a year of cathode active materials and anode copper foil for one million electric vehicles a year by 2025 at the TRIC location,” she said.
