Better: EV Batteries and the Circular Economy

One of the biggest questions about electric vehicles is: what happens to the battery when it reaches the end of its life in a car? The answer is what makes EVs part of a circular economy rather than a one-way pipeline of waste.

EV batteries are designed to last 10–15 years in vehicles — but when their capacity drops below what drivers need, they don’t go to a landfill. Instead, they enter a second life. Retired EV batteries can be reused in stationary storage systems, where they continue to store clean solar and wind energy for homes, businesses, or the grid.

Eventually, when those batteries are no longer useful for storage, they can be recycled. Today’s recycling technologies can recover more than 95% of critical minerals like lithium, cobalt, nickel, and copper. Those materials go straight back into the supply chain to build new batteries — reducing the need for new mining, cutting costs, and lowering environmental impact.

This creates a loop:

  1. Use in vehicles to power clean driving.

  2. Reuse in energy storage.

  3. Recycle to recover valuable materials.

The bottom line: EV batteries aren’t disposable — they’re part of a sustainable, circular system that keeps materials in use, lowers long-term costs, and helps drive the clean energy future.

 

EV Batteries: A Circular Economy—With Redwood Materials Leading the Way

Redwood Materials, founded in 2017 by former Tesla CTO JB Straubel, is at the forefront of building a circular, closed-loop battery supply chain in North America. The company’s mission? To capture the value in end-of-life lithium-ion batteries and turn them back into the materials needed to power the electric future. 

As of now, Redwood recycles over 95% of critical battery materials—lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, and more—and reintroduces them as high-quality cathode and anode components.  This means less mining, lower environmental impact, and a resilient domestic supply chain for battery manufacturing. 

But Redwood doesn’t stop at recycling—they’re innovating second life uses too. Their new division, Redwood Energy, repurposes EV batteries that still retain up to 50% capacity into modular grid-scale energy storage systems. One notable deployment is a 63 MWh microgrid at their Nevada campus, which powers a data center with clean, repurposed battery storage. 

Meanwhile, in large-scale recycling facilities, Redwood applies advanced mechanical and chemical processes—powered entirely by renewable energy—to recover over 95% of battery materials, with minimal waste and a drastically reduced environmental footprint (80% less energy, 70% fewer CO₂ emissions, 80% less water usage). 

Redwood’s work exemplifies how EV batteries reinforce a circular economy:

  1. Use: Batteries serve years in EVs.

  2. Repurpose: Still-powerful batteries get second life in energy storage.

  3. Recycle: High-grade raw materials recovered for new battery manufacturing.

  4. Reinvest: Makes the next generation of batteries greener, cheaper, and more sustainable.

With partnerships across the industry—including Toyota and Panasonic—and a growing domestic network of collection and processing, Redwood is turning EVs into an ecosystem of continual reuse, minimal waste, and local value.