The holy grail for any battery recycler is to produce the expensive components that go into battery cathodes and anodes. Both products today are manufactured almost entirely in Asia.

Anode is made from delicate copper foil that’s typically coated with graphite. The foil is a tenth of the thickness of a human hair and comes in wide rolls that look like industrial-sized wrapping paper. Each sheet, unraveled, would stretch for up to 15 kilometers (9 miles), and the slightest tear or puncture could lead to a defective battery cell.

Copper foil production has never existed in the U.S. For the last year, Redwood has been cranking out sample rolls for potential customers to test. In the coming weeks, the company’s foils will officially enter the supply chain to be used in American EVs, Straubel said. “It’s literally the first time anyone has made that material in the U.S. — ever — for a battery,” he said.

Redwood’s single foil-making machine can supply enough batteries a year for more than 13,000 long-range EVs. The perfectly smooth titanium drum, roughly the size of a small car, spins half-submerged in a bright blue bath of liquid copper sulfate. As it gets zapped with tens of thousands of amps of electricity, a silky sheet of copper forms from the bath and is subsequently wrapped onto a long roll.

The tool will soon be joined by nine additional copies, with more to come at a factory under construction in South Carolina. By 2028, the two locations will have 100 machines in operation, producing enough foil each year to wrap around the planet six times, according to Straubel.

The cathode, meanwhile, largely determines a battery’s performance, cost and environmental footprint. Getting the recipe right for the final black cathode powder takes years of work in partnership with each manufacturer that will buy it. Samples must undergo many rounds of testing and qualification before they’re ever put into a car. At Redwood, workers at the cathode plant must don fully sealed suits, including helmets with breathing tubes and two sets of gloves to ensure a perfect barrier at the sleeves.

So much rides on cathode performance that once a product is approved for use by a major battery manufacturer, the commercial relationship tends to be permanent. “It’s almost the definition of high risk, high reward,” said Andy Leach, an analyst at BloombergNEF.

Redwood’s qualification work has been underway for years. It signed an offtake agreement in 2022 to supply Panasonic’s new factory being built in Kansas City, and another for Toyota’s upcoming battery factory in North Carolina.

The cathode line that Redwood commissioned in March will produce just 50 megawatts worth of cathode a year. Its primary purpose is to perform additional testing with customers before Redwood turns on the giant 20 gigawatt-hour versions late next year.

Redwood’s recycling capabilities are impressive, but it’s far from enough to break U.S. dependence on Asian suppliers.The company is processing waste at a rate of almost 20 gigawatt-hours (GWh) a year, the equivalent of about a quarter million long-range EVs. That’s more battery recycling than Redwood and outside analysts had projected would be available in the U.S. for at least another year or two. Straubel chalks up the accelerated timetable to unanticipated EV recalls and higher-than-anticipated levels of scrap material from new battery factories.

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