Ford recently announced its partnership with Redwood Materials, a successful battery materials company, toward working together to improve battery recycling and create a domestic battery supply chain for new electric vehicles. The blue oval company and Redwood’s collaborative goal is to improve the sustainability of electric vehicles, decrease the prices for batteries, and uniformly help electric vehicles become accessible and affordable for a greater number of Americans.
The collaboration will help integrate battery recycling more thoroughly into Ford’s battery strategy in the U.S.. Redwood’s experience with recycling technology enables the company to recoup over 95% of battery materials, including cobalt, lithium, nickel, and copper. These elements can then be repurposed with Redwood moving to develop anode copper foil and cathode active materials for enhanced battery production in years to come. By sticking with locally produced, recycled battery materials, Ford can cut costs even further while increasing battery materials supply and reducing its dependency on imports and mining for raw materials.
Jim Farley, Ford CEO and president, stated, “Ford is making electric vehicles more accessible and affordable through products like the all-electric F-150 Lightning, Mustang Mach-E and E-Transit, and much more to come...Our partnership with Redwood Materials will be critical to our plan to build electric vehicles at scale in America, at the lowest possible cost and with a zero-waste approach.”
Ford is already putting down more than $30 billion in electrification efforts into 2025, including this collaboration between Ford and Redwood, which will support Ford’s plans to localize the larger battery supply chain.
This all bolsters Ford’s previous plans to scale battery manufacturing across multiple BlueOvalSK battery plants in the United States, starting in the mid 2020s. By leveraging their own national-level and sustainable supply chain with recycled materials, Ford can do its part to better protect the environment while driving costs down for production, and eventually for consumers.
Looking to the future, Ford and Redwood have interest working together to figure out the best approach for collecting and taking apart dead batteries designed for Ford’s electric vehicles toward better recycling measures that help reduce battery repair costs in addition to the costs affiliated with securing raw materials for brand-new batteries.
If you’re looking to get behind the wheel of one of Ford’s all-electric or hybrid vehicles, stop by Haldeman Ford in East Windsor, NJ! For any questions or concerns about electric vehicles or any others in our available inventory, don’t hesitate to contact us online, by phone, or in-person today!