Redwood Materials just designed a smarter battery recycling bin

If you want to recycle an old electric toothbrush or pair of headphones with a lithium battery embedded inside, it can be hard to find a place to do it—and many existing battery collection boxes are fire risks. That’s why Redwood Materials, the battery recycling and energy storage company founded by ex-Tesla engineer JB Straubel, just redesigned the collection bin.

The new bins, rolling out first in San Francisco stores in partnership with the city’s environmental department, can accept any type of rechargeable device, from phones to electric razors, earbuds, and loose lithium batteries. When someone drops a battery or device into a slot, the bin automatically lowers it into a sealed 50-gallon drum and coats it in fire suppressant. The bin also uses sensors to monitor itself to prevent fires.

“Consumer recycling has been incredibly challenging,” says Alexis Georgeson, Redwood’s vice president of external affairs and consumer recycling programs. “I think some of the issues and lack of technology to enable frictionless, free, visible collection points for consumers have contributed to the abysmal collection rates that we’re at right now.”

Only around 16% of electronics are recycled in the U.S. right now. “Most batteries end up in junk drawers or landfills, because fundamentally consumers just don’t understand how to get them recycled,” Georgeson says.

Redwood launched to handle battery recycling for buisnesses in 2017, but people who heard about the startup almost immediately began dropping off their own batteries at the company’s front door or shipping them in. The company started working with nonprofits and communities trying to make recycling easier, and previously placed standard collection bins at some locations. But those bins didn’t solve the challenge of fire risk, so they had to be monitored by staff.

The new bins manage fire risk without human intervention, so they can scale up much more easily. They’re also secure, so someone could feel safe dropping in an old phone or laptop, unlike in the open cardboard boxes that exist in some other stores. When the drums are full, Redwood adds them to pallets that are shipped back to its Nevada facility for recycling. (The fire suppressant is also reused.)

EV batteries still make up a bigger volume of the company’s recycling; a single Tesla Model 3 battery is equivalent to several thousand iPhone batteries. But as the number of battery-filled devices keeps proliferating, and consumers quickly get rid of them, the potential scale is large. Redwood plans to install the bins in other parts of the Bay Area, then Nevada, and then deploy them nationally.

Even before the official launch in San Francisco—and without any promotion or signage— the bins are already popular. “We actually rolled the bins out very quietly a couple of weeks ago, and we’ve already filled several of them up,” Georgeson says.

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