Redwood Expands Into Battery Materials

Redwood is moving from being a recycler to being a battery inputs manufacturer, which is where more of the industry’s value sits. Copper foil is the clearest proof point, because it is a precision battery part that cell makers buy on long contracts, not just a recovered metal. Redwood is already building this model in Nevada and South Carolina, using both recycled feedstock and new raw materials to make anode copper foil and cathode active materials close to U.S. battery plants.

• This changes how money flows through the business. Instead of earning mainly from processing old batteries and factory scrap, Redwood can also sell finished battery materials to Panasonic, Toyota, Ford, Volkswagen, and other cell and auto partners, which expands revenue per ton of metal handled.
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• Copper foil shows Redwood can do more than recover commodities. Battery foil is an ultra thin engineered sheet used as the anode current collector inside each cell. DOE said Redwood’s Nevada campus is designed to produce about 36,000 metric tons per year of battery grade foil and about 100,000 metric tons of cathode active materials.
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• The closer comparison set shifts from pure recyclers like Li-Cycle toward integrated battery supply chain builders. Redwood’s own materials work now overlaps with the kind of upstream manufacturing scale that Asian incumbents like CATL, LG Chem, and SK Innovation built from mined feedstocks, but with a domestic and partially circular input base.
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The next step is a broader battery materials stack, where Redwood adds more refining and manufacturing stages around the metals it already touches. If copper foil and cathode production keep scaling, Redwood can become a domestic battery materials anchor, with recycling acting as the feedstock engine and advanced manufacturing driving the larger long term market.