Toyota and its U.S. partner Redwood will collaborate on establishing a new industrial chain to produce traction batteries out of recycled EV power cells. Redwood will disassemble the battery packs used in old hybrid cars and extract raw materials for use in new vehicles.
The press release highlights the first-gen Toyota Prius as a textbook example of a car that came out on the U.S. roads roughly two decades ago and is now living through its last days. Recycling its battery cells would simultaneously let Toyota to save on expensive raw materials and minimize the environmental footprint.
Redwood says it will produce cathode and anode components out of the extracted materials. Up to 50% of cobalt and up to 20% of nickel and lithium can be recovered, too. The new materials will then be shipped to the Toyota Battery Manufacturing Plant, which the Japanese company has yet to build in the United States. The corporation is willing to invest up to $14 billion in this project, as long as it can get it running in two years.
On the whole, Toyota estimates that it will be able to procure and recycle around 5,000,000 spent battery packs within the framework of this new initiative.