US battery recycling company Redwood Materials is investing $3.5 billion in a new giant South Carolina recycling and manufacturing campus, Kallanish reports.

The facilities will recycle, refine and manufacture anode and cathode components to create a sustainable, closed-loop supply chain. The project will be built on a 600-acre campus near Charleston, South Carolina, and create about 1,500 jobs. Operations are slated to begin in phases, starting by the end of 2023.

The Nevada-based company plans to produce 100 gigawatt-hours of battery components a year, enough to power more than 1 million electric vehicles. The site has the room to expand to “several hundred GWh annually,” it says.

Redwood Materials intends to break ground on the all-electric campus at Camp Hall in Berkeley County in first quarter 2023. First recycling operations should be underway by year-end 2023. It adds it will build out downstream component manufacturing and scale moving forward.

The company, started by Tesla co-founder JB Straubel, has agreements with Tesla, Nissan, Volvo, Ford and the Volkswagen Group. It has signed a deal to furnish Panasonic Energy with high-nickel cathodes for its batteries.

“South Carolina allows us to meet our partners’ demand while also scaling in the most sustainable and cost-effective way,” the company says in a statement, noting Charleston’s port facilities also provide a shipping advantage.

The site is in the middle of what Redwood calls America’s developing battery belt that stretches from Michigan to Georgia where most US battery and EV facilities are being developed. South Carolina is a strong automotive state with 72,000 autoworkers, the company adds.

The decision to build its second US plant, complementing its Nevada facility, was encouraged by incentives offered by the Biden administration.