en.Wedoany.com Reported - US startup Red Metals Inc. has secured $10 million in seed funding, which it plans to use to build a $70 million recycled materials plant in Charleston, South Carolina, to enter the copper production sector.

Red Metals claims to have developed a new copper refining process aimed at bringing the manufacturing of finished copper products back to the United States. The process will extract copper from old products and scrap, rather than mining metal from increasingly depleted copper mines. According to Fast Company, discarded motors and Christmas lights are among the sources of recyclable copper.

Red Metals CEO Jackson Switzer stated that the US has the raw materials, demand, and labor for large-scale copper production, but lacks an economically viable refining process. The company will integrate physical processing, advanced sorting, and metallurgical refining into a continuous operation, directly converting copper raw materials into finished products, eliminating intermediate steps that add cost, time, and emissions in traditional refining.

Red Metals' first commercial product will be high-conductivity copper rod, used for wires, magnet wire, and other electrical applications. The company says the process is designed for feedstock flexibility, initially focusing on domestic copper scrap, and can achieve commercial viability without subsidies.

The $10 million funding round was led by Gigascale Capital, with participation from Future Ventures, Los Altos, California, and Boston-based MCJ, as well as Tesla co-founder JB Straubel. Switzer and Straubel previously worked together to establish metal production company Redwood Materials. Red Metals has also secured economic incentives from South Carolina and Charleston County to support the facility's development.

Red Metals did not disclose the specific capacity of the Charleston plant but stated it will create at least 45 jobs during the initial operational phase. Switzer compared the company's goals to the success of nearby North Carolina-based recycled steel manufacturer Nucor, noting that Nucor started small but eventually grew into the largest steel producer in the US.

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