Tesla co-founder JB Straubel has built an EV-battery colossus in the scrublands of Nevada. He spent the day giving me the first look at everything has been building.
It starts with *30 acres* of old batteries headed headed for recycling 
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Redwood's industrial campus is a 300-acre slope of buildings in various stages of completion. We followed cell phones and EV batteries recycled into 2500-pound bags of fluffy white lithium, then re-made into delicate foils and cathode CAM—the most valuable EV components 2/
It's the first full loop battery supply chain in the US — and probably in the world. Independent Stanford researchers were allowed access to Redwood's data for the most comprehensive real-world study of EV recycling. The environmental savings were 
3/ bloomberg.com/news/features/
3/ bloomberg.com/news/features/
Redwood is currently recycling batteries at a rate of of 20 GWh/year. That's an extraordinary amount —more than some analysts thought would even be available in the US for a few more years. But it's just a shadow of what's to come 4/ bloomberg.com/news/features/
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A key invention is the RC1, the machine that eats the machine. A giant rotating tunnel slow-cooks batteries at ~300C. It uses almost no energy—a self-perpetuating release from the cooked batteries. No oxygen, no fire, no waste. Gases are trapped & made into industrial products 5/
The story photos were by Reno photographer Emily Najera, who was great to work with. Here's the anode foil machine, a first for the US. The copper is 1/10 thickness of a human hair. An unspooled roll could reach 15 kilometers. Gift link to see more
: bloomberg.com/news/features/ 6/
: bloomberg.com/news/features/ 6/
“Once we've changed over the entire vehicle fleet to electric, we’ll only have to replace a couple % each year that’s lost in the process,” says Campbell. “It will become obvious to everyone that it doesn't make sense to dig out of the ground anymore” 7/ bloomberg.com/news/features/
The whole idea of "closed loop supply chains" always seemed a bit far-fetched. Seeing it in action, just a few miles down the road from Tesla's first battery Gigafactory, shows it's both possible and necessary to break China's stranglehold on the EV supply chain 8/
“The simple truth of it is that it’s a damn hard thing to do," Straubel said. "It's just shocking to me, given how much battery capacity is either online now or being built, and yet 100% of its supply chain is imported.” Gift link:
Great to see this. It took a good while for enough batteries to be ready for complete recycling.
Where “recycling” here mean separation of raw materials, not production of new batteries.
This is great, but you should really on your graph label what happend and what is a projection.
Particularly after remarking how wrong past predictions were...
Hmm, you forgot to mention how much energy this requires.
You also didn't mention how dirty it is.
Hmm
The two main US carbon markets have set record highs in 2024 as regulators on both coasts consider reforms to slash permit supply and align with steeper emissions reduction goals for 2030. Read more on czapp.com.
