That is incorrect. Much of the material enters a scrap/recycling stream that is like a pile of spaghetti thrown at a wall in a drunken rave party. My computer is sent to the local dump and placed in an electronics bin. That is delivered to an aggregator, they pull battery pack and separate major components, maybe or just ship the whole thing to India or China. There it is further broken de own and chips melted for gold etc, battery may or may not be recycled, etc. The copper is separated and resold to a scrap dealer, he melts it and sells it to a copper dealer, that copper dealer sells ingots to LG in Korea. LG in Korea takes that copper and produces copper foil, that copper foil end up in an LG battery back burning up in a Chevy Bolt in your neighbors garage. And the cycle is repeated. That is really the heart of Redwood's business model. Simplify the process and create their own cathode and anode materials. They are setup for a million units in the current facility and that is all scrap and recycled material based. Which is to say that the 1 Redwood facility is set to produce enough material to satisfy 100% of the USA EV anode and cathode battery needs of 2020. They have hardly begun.
As a society do an ok job on recycling, so much better than when I was a child 50 years ago. Some things like cars it is amazingly efficient, it almost all gets recycled so that when a car is sent to scrapyard it can be back in a car in as little as 3 months. Consumer electronics are a huge source of leakage. Smart of Redwood to start looking at that for feedstocks. Scrap is such a terrible supply chain issue that it is also low hanging.
The rare and expensive bits and pieces for the battery packs, the copper and heavy metals and such are already entering feedstock. It is not a zero sum game. Battery packs at the heart of it are just materials that are replacing other materials that have efficient recycling (ICE cars). There is already a huge amount of copper in a car, lead, gold, palladium, platinum, special stainless steels, etc. That all gets captured.
What's going to be new is Lithium and raw iron (don't think the LiFe packs use steel, we actually use very little iron in raw form anymore). Lithium is just so abundant that it is much to do about nothing. Lithium refining...that is a constraint. I expect LiFe to be the bulk of the additional capacity in 2023 and beyond because it is just so compelling and those batteries may not be recycled for decades but they also won't really matter from a global scarcity POV, recycling would neither constrain nor advance a mission.
The hard points are just a few metals such as nickel and some magnet rare earths. Price increases in any form will cause increase search for replacements.
