Redwood Materials Has Built A Recyling Empire

**JB Straubel** (0:08)
We're good, okay.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:15)
Okay, here we go. All right, JB, we're off on an adventure.

**JB Straubel** (0:22)
You ready to go?

**Ashlee Vance** (0:23)
Yes.

**JB Straubel** (0:25)
All right, here we go.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:27)
All right, man. So I think it was about, what, 2020 that I was here, and you guys, I know you'd started the company a bit before, but it was the early days, I think, when we arrived, of somebody getting to see what you were up to.

**JB Straubel** (0:44)
Yeah, I think 2020 was the year, it's been a while.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:46)
Yeah.

**JB Straubel** (0:47)
We've been busy and they're growing like crazy. This whole market has grown around us. It's an exciting time.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:53)
In Nevada, yeah, I can see you guys have been busy. For people who don't know the basics of Redwood Materials, how do you describe it?

**JB Straubel** (1:04)
Well, I would describe us as basically a battery ecosystem company. I personally love batteries. I love EVs and I love electrification. And we've built this company to solve problems in almost every aspect of that supply chain and in that value chain.
So when we got started, we were focused on recycling and end of life management for lithium ion batteries, for EVs and computers, phones, really every lithium ion battery out there. And we've expanded over the years and added in other pieces of business to that scope. So we added in a critical materials business, refining different components out of those batteries.
And then more recently, we've added in a whole energy storage business, functional energy storage, creating energy storage projects and assets out of largely remanufactured or second life batteries, which we've started seeing coming to us in huge numbers, tens of thousands. So in each step of that journey, we're really creating value out of waste, or minimizing waste, and adding more efficiency into that entire supply chain ecosystem for batteries and energy storage.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:25)
And this was born out, obviously, you're working at Tesla for many years, building this giant company, and you're just realizing that there wasn't a good system in place to start recycling the batteries that were coming back.

**JB Straubel** (2:38)
Absolutely. And I felt that every single day, it seemed like that was a common question from customers, buying an EV, what happens at the end of life? How is this going to work? Or is it a problem? And not only is it not a problem, but it's a big opportunity because batteries are so unusual and that they're almost 100 percent recyclable. All of those critical materials that we read a lot about and are concerned about, you can reuse 99 percent of them. And you can do it again and again. It's not just once.
So I kind of had a front row seat to witnessing that, you know, evolution and seeing some of those problems evolve at Tesla. And it kind of guided me into this opportunity to help the whole industry, really, all OEMs.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:26)
And I know we're going to see some of the battery storage stuff later, which is this new chapter. But I wanted to give people a feel because the first time I came to visit you, I don't think I fully wrapped my head around what you guys were doing until I saw it myself. But we're in, right now, pulling in to where people are going to send in their old cell phones, their toothbrushes, their battery packs, all this stuff. And you guys are going to...
Uh oh, you're in trouble.

**JB Straubel** (3:55)
That works well. I'm off loading this truck right now.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:57)
You're in trouble, boss.

**JB Straubel** (3:58)
No, now I'm in the wrong spot. Sorry about that, we'll back it up. Okay.

**Ashlee Vance** (4:07)
Does he know you're the boss?

**JB Straubel** (4:09)
Frankly, I'm thrilled if he's telling us we're in the way of going faster and getting stuff done. Yeah. It is a very active site, as you can obviously tell.

**Ashlee Vance** (4:18)
We're here to work.

**JB Straubel** (4:19)
We're in the middle of unloading trucks. We see 15 to 20 shipments a day coming in and out of here, full of batteries.
These are coming from automotive dealers, from OEMs, from other companies aggregating the small stuff that I just mentioned, like toothbrushes.

**Ashlee Vance** (4:38)
So they help gather those and then ship them to you in bulk?

**JB Straubel** (4:40)
Yeah.

**Ashlee Vance** (4:41)
Okay. Okay. And then, so for people to understand, it is nuts. I mean, you're taking these batteries and there's all these minerals inside what? Lithium, cobalt, nickel.