In 2017, JB Straubel - Tesla's co-founder and former CTO - realized something critical: the electric vehicle revolution was creating a massive battery waste problem, and the U.S. was dangerously dependent on foreign supply chains for critical materials. While still at Tesla, he saw firsthand how lithium, nickel, cobalt, and copper were extracted and processed halfway around the world, only to end up in landfills when batteries reached end-of-life. So he founded Redwood Materials with a singular vision to create a closed-loop, domestic battery supply chain that would keep these materials in circulation forever.
What started as a recycling operation in a Nevada facility has evolved into something far more transformative. Today, Redwood recycles end-of-life batteries to recover up to 95% of critical minerals, then refines and manufactures those materials into new battery components - all on American soil. The company has become the largest lithium-ion battery recycler in North America, processing around 90% of all recycled lithium-ion batteries on the continent. Beyond recycling, Redwood now deploys large-scale energy storage systems that power data centers and the nation's grid, including a groundbreaking microgrid project using repurposed EV batteries outside Reno. With two campuses in Nevada and South Carolina, an R&D center in San Francisco, and partnerships spanning Volkswagen, Toyota, BMW, Panasonic, and GM, Redwood is fundamentally reshaping how the world thinks about batteries - not as disposable products, but as perpetually recyclable resources.