‘A damn hard thing to do’: Tesla co-founder JB Straubel takes on battery recycling
Tesla Inc. co-founder JB Straubel wasn’t content with simply reinventing the automobile for the 21st century. He left in 2019 feeling he needed to redesign the global supply chain for the electrified future, too. That’s exactly what he’s been doing for the last five years. The company he built, Redwood Materials, is now the largest battery recycler in North America, and it’s using those recycled materials to manufacture complex battery components that have traditionally been imported from abroad, largely from China.
Straubel recently opened the doors for a first peek at the 300-acre industrial campus he’s built in the western Nevada desert. He said it hasn’t been easy.
“It feels like we’re going at breakneck speed, but we need to do a whole lot more,” he said. “It’s a damn hard thing to do.”
Straubel, 48, drives a Tesla Cybertruck emblazoned with his company’s green infinity logo, but he's careful to note that the flashy ride is a personal vehicle — “too expensive for Redwood.” Often seen as a countervailing force to Musk while they were building Tesla, Straubel returned last year to take a seat on the electric vehicle maker’s board. He wouldn’t talk about his oversight job there, other than his general motivation for doing it.
“I want it to succeed. I love the team there, it's close to my heart — always probably will be,” he said.
Straubel spoke to Bloomberg Green on March 22, the day Redwood commissioned its first commercial-scale line to produce cathode active material, a black powder that’s largely
