General Motors Partners with RedwoodMaterials for Battery Waste Recycling

TapTechNews on May 23rd reported that General Motors has announced a collaboration with the electric vehicle battery and recycling company RedwoodMaterials to recycle the waste generated from its two manufacturing plants located in Warren, Ohio and Spring Hill, Tennessee. (1 mile = 1.60934 kilometers)

RedwoodMaterials was founded by JBStraubel, the co-founder and former chief technology officer of Tesla. The company will handle 100% of the waste from the above two factories. TapTechNews noted that this cooperation is not directly with General Motors, but with its battery manufacturer UltiumCellsLLC, a joint venture with the South Korean LG Energy Solution company.

After this agreement was signed, Redwood said that they have established recycling partnerships with the majority of the major electric vehicle battery manufacturers in the United States. The waste that Redwood will handle includes cathode and anode materials, which are key components of lithium-ion batteries, and will process them into high-quality battery materials, and then sell them to its numerous partners for the manufacture of new electric vehicle batteries.

UltiumCellsLLC has begun shipping materials to Redwood's main plant in Nevada for recycling and processing. The joint venture is expected to produce 80 gigawatt-hours of battery cells annually at its two plants, and a third plant in Michigan is also under construction.

According to Redwood, even the most efficient battery manufacturers will generate 5-10% waste, which will exceed 10,000 tons per year, and all these materials can be recycled by Redwood's recycling facilities.

RedwoodMaterials was founded in 2017. In addition to handling the waste from General Motors' battery manufacturing process, the company also recycles electric vehicle batteries from companies such as Tesla, Ford, Toyota, Nissan, Specialized, Amazon, Lyft, and RadPowerBikes.

The batteries in the first batch of electric vehicles (such as the Nissan Leaf and the Tesla Model S) are now at the end of their service life and urgently need to be recycled. After Redwood receives batteries from its various partners, it will start a chemical recycling process to extract and refine related elements such as nickel, cobalt, and copper. According to Redwood, a certain percentage of these refined materials can be reused in the battery manufacturing process, and on average, 95% of the key battery metals can be recycled.