Redwood Materials, a battery recycler created by Tesla cofounder JB Straubel, says it’s more than tripling the size of its operations in Nevada and will spend “hundreds of millions” to scale up recovery of lithium, cobalt, nickel and other commodity metals it sells to makers of lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles.
Straubel, speaking in an Energy Department roundtable on Monday, told U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, that his Carson City, Nevada-based company is “hiring about 500 people here in just the next one or two years and investing several hundred million dollars into this particular area into those recycling facilities and scaling that up right now.”
Redwood said in an email message that it has purchased 100 acres near Tesla’s Gigafactory in Sparks, Nevada, and intends to expand its current 150,000-square-foot facility in the state by more than 400,000-square-feet. Additionally, it will hire about 500 more workers over the next two years, up from 130 people currently.