Rivian Hands End-of-Life Battery Packs to Redwood for Second Life or Recycling

Rivian is widening its work with Redwood Materials, and the new arrangement puts the recycler much closer to the heart of how the EV maker handles batteries once they come out of service. Under the expanded deal, Redwood will take back end-of-life packs collected through Rivian’s nationwide service centre network, then sort each one to decide its fate: repurpose it as stationary energy storage — either at Rivian’s own factories or at other sites — or send it down the recycling line.

Production scrap gets the same treatment. Battery waste left over from Rivian’s manufacturing will also flow to Redwood for recovery of materials rather than disposal.

The two companies are not starting from scratch. An earlier collaboration, announced in April 2026, centred on a single project: building 10 MWh of storage capacity from unused Rivian packs at the manufacturer’s plant in Normal. That pilot now looks like the groundwork for something considerably broader.

A recycler that keeps building storage

The shift reflects a change in Redwood’s own priorities. Since 2025 the company has kept its recycling business running — pulling out cobalt, nickel, copper and lithium — while steering more money and attention into stationary battery storage systems. Pairing the two sides makes practical sense. A pack that still holds usable capacity can sit in a storage container for years before it ever needs to be broken down, and the sorting step is what separates one outcome from the other.

For Rivian, the appeal is a closed loop it can point to as volumes grow. Service centres already receive the vehicles; now they become the collection point for the packs inside them. Redwood, meanwhile, gets a steady supply of feedstock along with a role Rivian describes as central to its end-to-end energy plans.

What is not yet public is how many packs the programme will handle, where the repurposed storage units will be installed beyond Normal, or what the financial terms look like. Those details will matter as Rivian’s fleet ages and the first substantial wave of retired packs starts arriving at service bays.