Red Metals Inc., a startup company seeking to enter the copper production sector, has announced $10 million in seed funding it says will help it build a $70 million recycled-content facility in Charleston, South Carolina.
The company says it has developed “a novel copper refining process designed to reshore the manufacturing of finished copper products to the United States.”
An article posted to the Fast Company website last week says the planned facility will involve “pulling copper from old products and scrap rather than extracting the metal from increasingly depleted copper mines.”
The article’s author, Adele Peters, quotes Red Metal Inc. CEO Jackson Switzer as citing discarded motors as one source of refinery feedstock that currently is being shipped overseas rather than feeding domestic furnaces and refineries. Peters also mentions Christmas lights as a source of recyclable copper.
Both Switzer and Red Metals' financial backer JB Straubel has been involved with setting up metals production firm Redwood Materials. Straubel also was a co-founder of Tesla Inc.
In addition to Straubel, the announced $10 million funding round was led by Gigascale Capital, with participation from Future Ventures, Los Altos, California, and Boston-based MCJ. Red Metals says it also has secured economic incentives from South Carolina and Charleston County to support development of the facility.
Red Metals refers to conventional copper refining as moving material “through multiple intermediate products, including concentrate, matte, anode, cathode and rod” in a process that is “designed for ore that is often less than 1 percent copper.”
Switzer says, “America has the feedstocks, the demand and the workforce to produce copper domestically at scale. What it has lacked is an economically viable refining process.”
He continues, “Red Metals is building an integrated, modern model that converts copper feedstocks directly into finished products closer to where they’re needed, reducing supply chain complexity while strengthening domestic manufacturing.”
Red Metals says it will integrate physical processing, advanced sorting and metallurgical refining into a single continuous operation, converting copper feedstocks directly into finished products while eliminating the intermediate steps that add cost, time and emissions in conventional refining.
“The process is designed to be feedstock-flexible, initially focused on domestic copper scrap, and to make domestic copper refining commercially viable without subsidies to help rebuild the industrial base and skilled manufacturing workforce needed for the 21st century,” the company says.
Red Metals says its first commercial product will be high-conductivity copper rod, which it calls “the industry standard input used in wire, magnet wire and other electrical applications.”
“Electricity and industry run on copper, and the U.S. has spent decades offshoring the refining and manufacturing capacity needed to produce it,” Straubel says. “Jackson has the rare combination of technical depth and operational pragmatism needed to rebuild that capability. What Red Metals is building is exactly the kind of industrial infrastructure America needs more of.”
Saying Nucor started at a smaller scale, Switzer says, “All the major steel producers like U.S. Steel dismissed them, [thinking that] because they’re out there at a small scale there’s no way they can compete. Fast forward to now; Nucor is the largest steel producer in the U.S. and other legacy steel producers have gone bust.”
Red Metals does not mention a production capacity figure for its planned Charleston facility, though it says the plant is “expected to create at least 45 jobs in its initial phase of operations.”