Redwood Materials is now working with Ultium Cells LLC—the joint battery cell manufacturing venture between General Motors and LG Energy Solution—to recycle production scrap from both their Warren, Ohio and Spring Hill, Tennessee facilities. Materials to be recycled include cathode and anode material as well as cell scrap.

Ultium Cells’ two facilities are each 2.8 million-square-feet operations that expect to produce more than 80 GWh combined of battery cells annually, with Redwood receiving the majority of the scrap from the manufacturing process.

Ultium is already shipping material from Gigafactories in Ohio and Tennessee and the company has a third facility under construction in Michigan. With this latest collaboration, Redwood now has contracts with most of North America’s battery cell manufacturers.

Cell manufacturing experiences a 5-10% scrap rate on average. This equates to daily truckloads full of material, and ~10,000 tons of material annually, for Redwood to recycle and remanufacture into critical battery components for cell manufacturing.

Redwood’s hydrometallurgy facility, the first commercial-scale nickel “mine” to open in the United States in a decade, not only recycles battery manufacturing scrap into raw nickel and cobalt but also stands as the only commercial-scale source of lithium supply to come online in the US in decades.

As part of the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program, Ultium Cells and Redwood were both selected by the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Loan Programs Office (LPO) to jumpstart critical battery materials and cell production domestically.