Why Amazon is backing this former Tesla executive’s recycling startup
JB Straubel’s Redwood aims to extract lithium, cobalt and nickel from old smartphones. …
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Tesla cofounder JB Straubel has been funded by Amazon for Redwood Materials, a start-up aiming to extract lithium, cobalt and nickel from old smartphones and other electronics for reuse in new electric batteries.
Redwood is one of five companies Amazon is investing in as part of its $2 billion Climate Pledge Fund, announced this year.
Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, said in a statement that this first batch of companies were “channelling their entrepreneurial energy into helping Amazon and other companies reach net zero by 2040 and keep the planet safer for future generations.”
Mr. Straubel, Tesla’s technology chief from 2003 until last year, founded Redwood in 2017 after seeing that the global shift towards electric vehicles is likely to cause unnecessary environmental damage from a surge in mining.
His vision is a “world where all of the transportation is done by electric vehicles and we have batteries powering a sustainable world,” he told the Financial Times. “And all of those batteries are able to be recycled and remanufactured many, many times, so that we can have a nearly closed loop.”
Redwood has fewer than 100 employees but has already attracted $40m of investment from Capricorn Investment Group, a sustainability-focused venture capital firm, and Breakthrough Energy Ventures, an environmental fund backed by Mr. Bezos, Bill Gates and several other billionaires mostly from the world of tech.
“There are a phenomenal amount of cell phones in the world
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