Ford EV Partner Says It Can Recycle Damaged Batteries

Back in September 2021, Ford announced that it was teaming up with Redwood Materials to create a battery recycling and domestic battery supply chain for electric vehicles. Since then, Redwood has begun recycling old EV and hybrid batteries while racking up additional investments from the government and investors, including from some of Ford’s rivals – such as General Motors, Toyota, and BMW. Now, the Ford EV partner has announced that it’s capable of recycling not just old batteries, but also, units that have been damaged, too.

Redwood Materials notes that it’s capable of recycling batteries impacted from roadway incidents and natural disasters, and in fact, has already done so on multiple occasions. Recently, the company was able to team up with local authorities when a truck carrying a container of lithium-ion batteries overturned in between Las Vegas and Los Angeles, which resulted in a fire that shut down the highway for a couple of days. The same was true of another incident in Connecticut, as Redwood was able to salvage most of the metals contained in those batteries to reuse for future units. Along with this practice, Redwood teamed up with contaminated material companies to ensure that the sites were cleaned up properly.

The same was true in the wake of devastating fires in Maui back in 2023, when Redwood worked with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to collect, transport, and manage all the damaged lithium batteries from Lahaina used in residential stationary storage systems, golf carts, and electric vehicles. These batteries were safely transported to the company’s Nevada facility and have since been recycled with the recovered nickel, cobalt, copper, and lithium returned back to the supply chain.

We’ve seen this practice in action before with a variety of old Ford EV batteries serving a second life as power generators, along with conventional end-of-life hybrid and all-electric vehicle battery recycling. These efforts recently earned the company a spot on the 2024 Time100 list, which highlights what the magazine determines to be the most influential outfits in the world.