Closed-Loop Battery Recycling: An OEM and a Recycler Span the Whole Battery Life
Closed-Loop Battery Recycling
Rivian and Redwood Materials announced on 14 October 2026 a major expansion of their partnership, making Redwood a key partner across the full life of a Rivian battery — from manufacturing scrap through second-life storage to final materials recovery.
Under the expanded scope, Redwood collects Rivian EV battery packs through Rivian’s nationwide network of service centres once the packs are no longer suitable for use in a vehicle. Each pack is then assessed to decide its next destination.
Packs with useful capacity remaining are repurposed for stationary energy storage, deployed either at Rivian’s own manufacturing facilities or at other sites. Packs that cannot be repurposed are recycled. Redwood will now also take the battery scrap generated by Rivian’s manufacturing operations.
Building on an Existing Storage Deployment
The new agreement extends work announced in April 2026, under which 10 megawatt-hours of battery energy storage built from repurposed Rivian packs is being deployed at the automaker’s manufacturing plant in Normal, Illinois.
Rivian founder and chief executive RJ Scaringe described giving retired packs a second life in stationary storage as a significant unlock for the energy transition, framing it as a way to make the grid more reliable and lower energy costs. Redwood founder and chief executive JB Straubel said every returned Rivian pack is a potential source of domestic grid storage as well as critical materials, and that integrating and redeploying those batteries enables faster, more flexible and more cost-efficient storage.
Why Second Life Comes Before Recycling
EV batteries that have reached the end of their automotive service life frequently retain substantial usable energy capacity. In stationary applications they can absorb electricity during periods of low demand or high renewable output and dispatch it when demand peaks, easing stress on the grid and reducing costs for both the host facility and the wider network.
Redwood’s technology architecture is designed to integrate packs into a system that responds to the needs of the facility it serves rather than operating as a fixed, standalone asset.
Recovery of Critical Minerals
When a pack is finally exhausted, or where scrap arises in manufacturing, it enters Redwood’s recycling process. That process recovers critical minerals including lithium, nickel, cobalt and copper at rates exceeding 95 percent, feeding a circular, domestic supply chain for battery materials in the United States.
This is the part of the story that matters most to the wider resource-recovery sector. Every tonne of lithium, nickel, cobalt or copper pulled back out of a retired pack is a tonne that does not have to be mined, shipped and refined — and a tonne that never enters the waste stream.
One Partner, Several Problems
The arrangement also reflects a shift in how manufacturers are sourcing power. With grid connections taking years to secure and conventional infrastructure supply-constrained, industrial operators increasingly want a single partner who can recover materials, manage recycling and deploy storage as one integrated system rather than as separate vendor relationships.
That integration — one partnership spanning the whole battery lifecycle — is the model other OEMs and recyclers will now be measured against.
From Battery Scrap to a Bankable Recovery Plant
Klean Industries delivers critical-materials and resource-recovery plants on a KBR turnkey basis: performance-guaranteed, 100% bankable and structured so the project risk sits with us, not with you. If your feedstock is production scrap, end-of-life packs or any other recoverable waste stream, we size, engineer and guarantee the plant that monetises it.
Our references are commercial scale, not pilot scale — including a commercial recovered carbon black plant operating in Poland. That is the standard of proof we bring to every feasibility study and every performance guarantee.
You can take either route: license the technology and build it with your own EPC team, or have Klean build it turnkey end to end. Start with a feasibility study and we will tell you honestly whether your material stream supports a bankable project.
Contact Klean Industries » GO.
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