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U.S. solar output is growing astronomically, and while it is leading the charge to electrify the American grid with renewable energy, the technology isn’t built to last forever. There is current demand for solar panel recycling services, and a few standout companies have already established factories in the United States to process tens of thousands of damaged or otherwise unusable modules.
That demand will undoubtedly grow over the next decade as projects built during the late aughts start to reach the end of their operating lifespan, and because installations have only increased since then, so too will the number of disposed solar panels.
“Unfortunately, I think a large percentage of panels in the United States are still being landfilled,” said Steven Turk, CFO of SolarPanelRecycling.com. “But more and more companies, due to their ESG goals and other reasons, are starting to recycle.”
Even when damaged or at the end of life, there are materials inside solar modules that can be fed back into the supply chain. But getting to the point of properly extracting them has taken some time and ingenuity from the recyclers creating this market.
Formalizing solar panel recycling
Three years ago, Suvi Sharma left his role with solar panel manufacturer Solaria to study circular supply chains and economies. After researching recycling across industries, he directed his attention back toward solar and co-founded SolarCycle, a crystalline silicon solar module recycler with two operational facilities in Odessa, Texas, and Mesa, Arizona, and a third on the way in Cedartown, Georgia.
“We had made phenomenal strides in making solar panels more efficient, cheaper, doing more PV systems and financing them, but had not yet figured out how to recycle these panels that were reaching the end of life, and creating a circular supply chain,” Sharma said. “When I started looking at why that is, it’s because we needed to develop the technology to do this at scale. When you go to a solar panel manufacturing facility, you’ll see equipment process materials you won’t see anywhere else, right? Because it’s highly specialized. We need to do the same thing for recycling solar — for ‘de-manufacturing’ these panels.”
Since its founding, SolarCycle has processed modules from all 50 states and other territories across North America.
SolarPanelRecycling.com (SPR) is a subsidiary of longtime electronics recycler Powerhouse Recycling. Powerhouse started recycling PV after a utility customer came to the company with a decommissioned large-scale solar project. After establishing solar recycling measures in house, SPR was founded almost 18 months ago.
With backing from Powerhouse, SPR has four processing plants — two in Salisbury, North Carolina, a glass processor outside of Atlanta, Georgia, and a fourth facility in Breckenridge, Texas, that is opening shortly.
Solar contractors, developers, equipment distributors or any other entity with a load of panels in need of disposal hire recyclers to handle the logistics and haul the panels to a regional processing plant. Solar recycling customers are typically national companies with large installation footprints and big stockpiles needing recycled instead of smaller individual residential contractors.
Recyclers are building processing plants in regions where there is demand for end-of-life solar panel offtake. SolarCycle has deliberately located its processing plants in southern states because of their proximity to most major solar installations. SPR will even open a new plant next to a large-enough decommissioning or repowering project if necessary.
“To solar asset owners that are concerned about capacity, in my view, it’s not really a huge issue, because if someone were to come to us and say, ‘we have this large facility that needs repowering or had a weather event, and we have hundreds of thousands of panels there,’ well, it would be economical at that point for us to just build a facility near them,” Turk said.
Being nearby significantly reduces hauling costs and reduces the chances someone will decide to send modules to the landfill instead.
Avoiding the landfill
Despite being inherently green in operation, certain types of solar modules can be considered solid or hazardous waste for the presence of lead and cadmium telluride, and several states have barred the technology from entering their landfills. Disposing of solar modules in any capacity comes at a cost, and while not on par with the cost of landfilling quite yet, solar panel recycling services have both an environmental and economic benefit.
For one, these panels aren’t sitting indefinitely in landfills. Most of the materials extracted can be fed back into the supply chain. Each brand and model of solar panel will have slight differences in componentry, but they are largely the same, being composed mostly of glass, a metal frame (often aluminum), silicon, copper and silver.
“The difficulty there is we can’t just throw a full solar panel into a shredder and get a usable product, whereas with printers and other devices you could,” Turk said. “So, the real difficulty in solar recycling is to somehow eliminate the challenge of this contamination that occurs within the encapsulant.”
Encapsulant bonds the interior elements of a solar panel together, but if improperly removed, it can contaminate those surrounding components. Recycling solar panels starts with removing the junction box and metal frame, then shaving off the glass so the encapsulant doesn’t taint the silicon solar cells. Next, the rest of the panel is crushed and shredded, and the precious metals contained within are extracted. The materials run through filtration and pass through air density and electrostatic separation chambers for cleaning.
Those cleaned and separated elements are returned to the supply chain and sold to various vendors. Recycled glass is often repurposed into fiberglass insulation, and SolarCycle will soon make new glass for solar panels using recycled materials processed at its Georgia facility. Metals have high recyclability and are reused in many different products.
Industry analysts expect solar panel manufacturing to command one-fifth of the global silver supply by 2030, so Sharma believes some of silver being recycled today is ending up back in solar panels. For materials like silicon, recyclers hope to eventually feed that back to PV manufacturers to create a fully recycled, domestic solar module.
“If we do this right, the way we’re trying to, we can make solar the most circular industry in the world,” Sharma said. “The solar panel product itself, the fact that it’s mostly glass and metals, and the fact that these large solar companies, most of them are very forward-thinking and progressive and really looking at how to create a sustainable industry long term.”
How are panels damaged?
Despite having operating lifespans of around three decades, solar panels aren’t invincible. They are primarily made of fragile glass.
There are a few reasons why solar panels are sent to recyclers:
Manufacturing defects
Installation, construction or shipping damage
Operations and maintenance losses (warranty issues)
Weather damage
Repowering projects
Decommissioning projects
The companies reported that among this group, decommissioning is the smallest contributor, but Sharma said he expects project decommissioning to eventually match installation numbers as more big solar projects reach the end of their lifespans. Right now, both SolarCycle and SPR’s largest pool of recycled panels originates from construction breaks, followed by weather damage.
“I think the reason for that is there are so many being installed currently,” Turk said. “Even if the percentage being damaged during installation is small, you’re still talking about hundreds of millions of panels going in, so it becomes a large part of the stream.”
Weather damage is another source of broken panels for the recyclers, because the frequency of severe climate events has increased. In 2024 alone, there have been 15 reported weather events causing more than $1 billion in damages in the United States.
Drawing a circular supply chain
There is still plenty to accomplish in solar panel recycling. SolarCycle recently built a 500-kW solar project composed entirely of decommissioned solar panels that is powering 50% of its Odessa, Texas, plant. The company is researching how to recycle cadmium telluride panels primarily manufactured by First Solar and ways to remelt and repurpose recycled glass for use in new products.
“There are no crystalline silicon module solar glass factories for us to send it to in the U.S., so we’re doing it ourselves and vertically integrating downstream in the materials manufacturing,” Sharma said. “That’s a heavy lift from an operation and capital intensity standpoint, so that’s a big focus for us in really closing the loop and creating that circular supply chain for solar.”
And SolarPanelRecycling.com has opened its latest facility in Texas, plans to have another open within a year and is waiting at the ready to start new regional facilities throughout the United States as demand requires.
As their services expand, solar recyclers hope they can match and eventually beat the price of disposing in landfills. That way, they can be one step closer to making this technology as green as it can be. |
