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A Tesla Co-Founder Aims To Build an Entire U.S. Battery Industry
Redwood Materials, led by J.B. Straubel, is planning a massive new factory to move $25 billion of the battery supply chain from Asia to the U.S.
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Redwood Materials Inc., the battery recycling company created by Tesla Inc. co-founder J.B. Straubel, has been keeping a big secret: It isn’t really a recycling company.
Sure, Redwood has risen quickly to become the biggest lithium-ion battery recycler in the U.S.. But Straubel didn’t leave Tesla in 2019 just to clean out America’s junk drawers. His broader goal, described to Bloomberg for the first time, is to move a huge chunk of the battery-component industry from Asia to the U.S.