New Battery Recycling Plans From Tesla Co-Founder JB Straubel

It has been a long time since Tesla co-founder JB Straubel gave us an update on his plans to recycle batteries. In early 2017 he stepped down from his position at Tesla in order to create his own startup called Redwood Materials. The aim of this company is to recycle as many scrapped products from Tesla Gigafactory battery production as possible, providing a longer and more sustainable way of consuming battery cells.

Until now EVs are still in relatively early life cycles meaning that they are not yet having batteries swapped out due to efficiency losses.

A future issue
In the next decades, this will become a problem with many batteries needing to be disposed of in an environmentally friendly manner.
Straubel plans to make Redwood Materials the solution to this problem, at a technology conference on Wednesday he revealed some of his plans for Redwood.

Partnerships
He plans to continue partnerships with both Panasonic and Jeff Bezos's Amazon. Redwood started the Panasonic partnership last year, allowing the Japanese battery maker to recover materials from the Redwood recycling plant based in Carson City.

Straubel considers that recycling batteries will play a major role in fighting emissions and that it is a necessary adjustment in order to enable worldwide EV adoption. The idea is to create closed-loop cycles for materials that constitute battery cells.

Tesla plans
Elon Musk talked about this briefly during the Tesla Battery Day event this year claiming that Tesla would be able to recycle most of the new battery cells materials, it aims to start its own in house recycling process in Nevada, allowing for new batteries to come from old batteries.

The negative connotations that many bring up when the environmental impact of batteries comes to the conversation are almost entirely falsified with this new tech at play.

What do you think will be the next move from Tesla in regard to increasing sustainability? Will it come as a product improvement or as a new product entirely? Share your thoughts and ideas in the comments.
If you can't get enough of Tesla here is a link to my latest story.

Guillaume Humbert a Torque News automotive journalist covering Tesla news. "The way he first heard about Tesla was when he accidentally found a livestream of one of Tesla's cars back in 2018. It may sound boring, except this car was cruising in space. Since then Humbert has been following the EV automaker closely. Any of Tesla's innovations make the future look environmentally more friendly. "I am now trying to share the hope Tesla spread and inspire others through my articles," says Humbert whom you can follow on Twitter at Thinking Enthusiast.