Randolph County, North Carolina — In a continued push towards greater sustainability, Toyota has agreed to source Redwood Materials’ CAM and anode copper foil to use in battery production at the automaker’s future North Carolina battery manufacturing plant.
Redwood Materials and Toyota have been working on building a closed-loop battery ecosystem since 2022. In regards to this recent project, a spokesperson from Redwood Materials noted that “we will [now] recycle [Toyota’s] EVs and plug-in-hybrid vehicles to help source materials that will build these components that will eventually end up back in [Toyota’s] new vehicles.”
For Toyota’s products, Redwood will target a minimum of 20 percent recycled nickel, 20 percent recycled lithium and 50 percent recycled cobalt from the cathodes; and 100 percent recycled copper from the anode copper foil.
The company’s large-scale source of domestic materials will be produced from as many recycled batteries as available and then augmented with sustainably mined resources as needed.
Redwood hasn’t disclosed financial terms of the long-term contract with Toyota, but it’s “significant and important for us,” said Redwood Materials’ founder and CEO JB Straubel. “It’s our first end-to-end [automaker] supply agreement, and the most interesting, newest part of this is it’s the first time as far as we’re aware that a major [automaker] has gone all the way from recycling back to component procurement.”
“Accelerating our recycling efforts and domestic component procurement gets us closer to our ultimate goal of creating a closed-loop battery ecosystem that will become increasingly important as we add more vehicles with batteries to roads across North America,” said Christopher Yang, Toyota North America’s Group vice president.
