During his time there, the company grew from a scrappy startup peddling sports cars to the most valuable auto manufacturer on the planet. Straubel is cofounder and, until last year, was the CTO at Tesla, a company he joined when it was possible to count all of its employees on one hand. After all, he played a significant role in creating it. Straubel understands the problem better than most. The dirty secret of the EV revolution is that it created an e-waste timebomb-and cracking lithium-ion recycling is the only way to defuse it. The International Energy Agency predicts an 800 percent increase in the number of EVs over the next decade, each car packed with thousands of cells. This marks the beginning of a tsunami of spent batteries, which will only get worse as more electric cars hit the road. Now vehicles from that first production wave are just beginning to reach the end of their lifespan. Over the past decade, the world’s lithium-ion production capacity has increased tenfold to meet the growing demand for EVs. Redwood is part of a wave of new startups racing to solve a problem that doesn’t really exist yet: How to recycle the mountains of batteries from electric vehicles that are past their prime. This is the home of Redwood Materials, a small company founded in 2017 with an ambition to become the anti-Gigafactory, a place where batteries are cooked down into raw materials that will serve as the grist for new cells. Panasonic ships truckloads of cells that don’t pass their qualification tests to a facility in Carson City, about a half hour’s drive south. But not all the batteries are cut out for a life on the road. These cells, produced on site by Panasonic, are destined to be bundled together by the thousands in the battery packs of new Teslas. Every day, millions of lithium-ion batteries roll off the line at Tesla’s Gigafactory in Sparks, Nevada.
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