Rivian and Redwood Close the Loop: Old Packs Get a Second Life, Then a Second Round of Materials

Rivian’s used battery packs now have two possible futures, and neither one is a landfill. Redwood Materials has widened its partnership with the Illinois-based automaker to take on battery production scrap alongside packs that have finished their in-vehicle service — turning scrap metal and spent cells into feedstock for the domestic supply chain.

The move deepens a relationship that already had roots. In April 2026, the two companies kicked off a project putting 10 MWh of repurposed Rivian packs to work as stationary storage at Rivian’s factory in Normal, Illinois.

How a Retired Pack Moves Through the System

The collection side runs through Rivian’s nationwide service center network. When a pack comes back, it isn’t automatically destined for the shredder. Redwood evaluates each unit first:

• Second life: packs with usable capacity left get rebuilt into energy storage for Rivian’s manufacturing sites or other locations.
• Recycling: packs past that point are broken down and their minerals recovered.
• Scrap: production waste from Rivian’s battery lines feeds into the same recovery stream.

On the recycling side, Redwood claims its process pulls out lithium, nickel, cobalt and copper at recovery rates above 95%. That figure matters more than it looks — those four materials are exactly the ones that make battery supply chains expensive and geopolitically awkward.

The Numbers: 10 MWh of second-life storage at Normal, Illinois · 95%+ recovery of lithium, nickel, cobalt and copper

Why the CEOs Frame This as a Grid Story

Redwood founder and CEO JB Straubel pitched the arrangement as a supply question with a grid answer. Every pack that returns, he said, is “a potential source of domestic grid energy storage in addition to critical materials,” adding that Redwood’s ability to integrate and redeploy Rivian batteries with its own technology could enable “fast, flexible and more cost-efficient energy storage.”

Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe took the same angle from the automaker’s side, calling second-life stationary storage “a massive unlock for the energy transition” and arguing the partnership turns retired packs into a tool for a more reliable grid and lower energy costs.

Strip out the executive optimism and there’s a practical logic here. EV batteries retire with plenty of capacity left — they just can’t meet the demands of a vehicle anymore. Stationary storage is far less punishing. Pairing that with high-rate mineral recovery means Rivian extracts value twice from the same pack before anything is truly spent.

What’s still open is scale. Neither company has published volumes for how many packs the expanded program will handle, and the economics of second-life storage depend heavily on collection logistics. But the structure — service network in, storage and recycling out — is now in place.

For Rivian, it’s also a useful answer to a question every EV maker will face as its earliest vehicles age out: what happens to the battery?