Inside the world's largest battery recycler: JB Straubel on why Redwood is now America's biggest cobalt producer
Key takeaways from Core Memory Podcast factory tour with Redwood Materials founder and CEO JB StraubelDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → (12 June 2026):
From recycler to battery ecosystem company. Straubel — a Tesla co-founder — described Redwood as a full battery-ecosystem company spanning recycling and end-of-life management, a critical-materials refining business, and a new functional energy-storage arm, all designed to "create value out of waste" across the supply chain.
~70% of US end-of-life batteries flow to Redwood. Straubel estimated that around 70% or more of America's dead lithium-ion batteries — from EVs down to phones and toothbrushes — end up at Redwood, with 15 to 20 truckloads coming in and out of the Nevada site each day.
Now the largest cobalt producer in the United States. Redwood is already the biggest US cobalt producer, all of it from "secondary feeds" — disassembling and refining material out of products already imported and bought — which Straubel called one of the company's biggest strategic assets versus mining from scratch.
99% recyclable, and repeatable. Batteries are "almost 100% recyclable," Straubel said: copper, nickel and cobalt are recovered in the high-90s%, aluminium ~95%+, and even lithium — the toughest, at under 10% of a cell's weight — at high rates, and the materials can be reused "again and again."
Tens of gigawatt-hours a year. Last year Redwood received "tens of gigawatt hours equivalent of batteries" — the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of cars, or tens of thousands of tonnes of material per year — diagnosed and sorted for reuse, repair or recycling.
Second-life batteries now power AI data centres. A standout stop was a huge array of remanufactured second-life battery packs powering modular data centres from partner Crusoe Energy — running real customer AI workloads on what Straubel said are NVIDIA GPUs, fed primarily by solar with the storage smoothing supply through the night.
Nevada as a boom town. Straubel said large industrial projects move "very, very fast" in Nevada versus California, with Google building a data centre next door amid enormous data-centre-driven energy demand — a build-out he likened to a boom town.
50x growth still ahead. Despite the scale, Straubel said Redwood is only tackling "a few percent" of all batteries ever deployed and must grow "at least 50 times" just to match the volume of new batteries being sold — while continually adapting its processes to new chemistries like LMR, iron phosphate and solid state as makers compete with China.
Source: Core Memory Podcast with Ashlee Vance — 12 June 2026.
