Tesla’s Scrap Hell Helps Explain Battery-Recycling Deals by Ford and GM

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Today, we look at the reality behind one of the buzziest spaces in the electric vehicle mania: battery recycling. If you take away one word, it's scrap.

In September, Ford Motor Co. announced what it called a critical new dimension in its effort to scale up an electric vehicle business: a $50 million investment in Redwood Materials, a Nevada-based battery recycling startup founded by Tesla veteran JB Straubel. As part of the deal, Redwood said it would help Ford reclaim and recycle its batteries once they reached the end of their useful life, and then install the recovered metals in new EV electrodes. 

I couldn’t figure out why Ford, General Motors and other automakers were making a public fuss about their battery recycling deals in the past year. Ford is only now beginning large-scale EV production, so even if all goes according to plan, significant numbers of its customers won’t cast off their electric Mustang Mach-Es and F-150 Lightning pickups until the 2030s. 

What was I missing? Scrap—specifically, a mountain of metal and other material that’s discarded during the battery-making process. When these trimmings from long sheets of cathodes and anodes, defective cells and packs, and rejects of other various sorts are collected from the factory floor, they can be quickly recycled into first-rate battery cells.