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Despite Redwood Materials recycling 70% to 80% of end of life lithium ion batteries in the USA, technically they aren’t just a battery recycling company. They are a battery materials manufacturer building capacity to domestically manufacture the most important, most expensive, hardest to produce component of LIB’s: Cathode Active Material.
Cathode Active material (or CAM) is a custom molecule made of lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese, sometimes aluminum and iron, that makes up the positive electrode of a lithium ion battery. It’s largely responsible for charge rate, cycle life, performance, safety, quality, cost, everything we care about in battery containing devices, and today it’s exclusively produced overseas as part of a complex 50,000-mile supply chain. Cathode active material makes up 60% of the total cost of LIB’s and can be a significant part of the total cost of battery powered devices. For example, CAM represents about 15% of the total cost of an EV produced in the U.S.
The U.S. automotive industry is on track to spend $600 billion on CAM overseas by 2032 to supply the rapidly growing domestic EV sector. Currently, battery materials are supplied to industry through traditional mining.
These materials will travel from where they come out of the ground (mining) through various refining and processing steps before ending up in a battery containing device; at which point they will be concentrated between 50 and 500 times those of a typical ore. For example, industry has to mine and refine 78 pounds of lithium, cobalt, nickel and copper ore to produce the 15.5 grams of battery metal it takes to make a cell phone battery.
Redwood is building the first domestic commercial scale cathode manufacturing operation in Northern Nevada. By intrinsically linking the recycling and refining of battery metals recovered from old battery containing devices and EVs to new Cathode Active Material manufacturing, Redwood will increase the CAM supply while reducing the environmental and economic cost of lithium-ion batteries.
What makes Redwood different from other battery materials manufacturers is that rather than mining the earth, we mine your junk drawers. Battery metals do not degrade over the course of a device’s life. While your cell phone or smart watch will not hold the same charge in three or four years, all of the battery metals are still there. Between 95% and 98% of those metals can be recovered in RWM’s process and be remanufactured into new Cathode Active Material that according to Argonne national labs (redwoodmaterials.com/news/argonne-national-laboratory-verifies-redwood-cathode-performance) performs at least as well, possibly a little better, than CAM sourced from exclusively virgin mined material.
Not only does our recycling process reduce the energy and water required (as well as the emissions profile) of Redwood CAM, but it also means the products that use batteries produced with recycled material are inherently more sustainable.
Our circular supply chain is entirely dependent on you closing the loop. Click here to see where you can locally recycle your rechargeable batteries and devices with Redwood Materials: redwoodmaterials.com/recycle-with-us
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