Redwood building US battery supply chain

Redwood is moving up the battery stack, from recycler to domestic component manufacturer, which matters because the hardest part of replacing Asian supply is not collecting old batteries, it is making battery grade foil and cathode material at scale inside the U.S. Nevada is being built to do both in one loop, and South Carolina extends that model closer to the next wave of Southeastern battery plants.

• Most U.S. recyclers stop at black mass or recovered metals. Redwood goes further and sells finished inputs that cell makers actually feed into production lines, anode copper foil and cathode active material. That makes it a substitute for incumbent Asian suppliers, not just a scrap processor.
  1 sacra 2 energy 6 redwoodmaterials
• The domestic angle is physical, not rhetorical. Panasonic agreed to buy Redwood copper foil for Sparks, Nevada and cathode material for De Soto, Kansas, while Redwood sited a second battery materials campus near Charleston because many new U.S. battery plants are in the Southeast and still depend heavily on Asian inputs.
  3 panasonic 4 redwoodmaterials 5 redwoodmaterials 7 panasonic
• The model also changes how money flows. Redwood can get paid once to take scrap and end of life batteries, then get paid again when it sells refined materials back into new battery production. That vertical loop is why the DOE backed the Nevada campus with a conditional $2B loan commitment.
  1 sacra 2 energy

The next step is a U.S. battery supply chain where recycled feedstock and domestic mined material both flow into Redwood campuses, then out as production ready components to nearby cell plants. If Redwood keeps qualifying materials with anchor customers, it becomes core infrastructure for North American battery manufacturing, not just a recycling company.