I co-founded Tesla and helped create the EV revolution. Now I'm solving the problem we created: what happens to all those batteries when they die? The answer shouldn't be a landfill — it should be a new battery.
We can recover 95% of the critical minerals from a dead battery — lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper — and turn them back into battery-grade materials. That's not recycling. That's a closed-loop supply chain.
Mining lithium is expensive, environmentally destructive, and geopolitically complicated. Recycling it from old batteries is cheaper, cleaner, and keeps the supply chain domestic. The economics are obvious.
I started Redwood in my garage in Nevada. People ask why the Tesla CTO was working in a garage. Because that's where you start when you're solving a problem nobody else is working on yet.
The real flood of dead EV batteries won't arrive until the late 2020s. We're building the infrastructure now so we're ready when it does. You don't build the recycling plant after the batteries pile up.
Panasonic, Ford, Toyota, and Volkswagen are all our partners. They supply us with battery scrap and buy back the refined materials. We're not competing with automakers — we're completing their supply chain.