SOLARCYCLE Gears up to Build Out U.S.-based Solar Panel Recycling and RemanufacturingSOLARCYCLE Gears up to Build Out U.S.-based Solar Panel Recycling and Remanufacturing

Scaling recycling infrastructure has not been easy. The early movers have had some technical hurdles to clear. SOLARCYCLE is among a few innovators making headway. Today the company runs an R&D recycling plant to test next-gen technologies and a Texas plant ramping up to process over one million panels a year (50 million pounds).

Arlene Karidis, Freelance writer

January 21, 2025

4 Min Read
solar panel recycling
SOLARCYCLE

Solar has evolved from a cottage industry to a heavy hitter in the global energy space. It will have accounted for 58 percent of new electric-generating capacity in 2024, estimates The U.S. Energy Information Agency.

The boom is credited to a decades-long focus on improving the technology’s efficiency and lowering cost— but what to do with these massive solar arrays once they retire became an afterthought.

Now a few companies are working to get on top of this end-of-life stream, expected to reach one million metric tons in 2030 and spiral to tenfold that by 2050. That’s in the U.S. alone.

Scaling recycling infrastructure has not been easy. The early movers have had some technical hurdles to clear.

SOLARCYCLE is among a few innovators making headway. Today the company runs an R&D recycling plant to test next-gen technologies and a Texas plant ramping up to process over one million panels a year (50 million pounds). A third facility, planned for Georgia, will initially do twice that volume and be able to process 10 million panels a year in time, says SOLARCYCLE CEO and co-founder Suvi Sharma.

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Hitting that 10-million mark is one of several of the industry veteran’s ambitions.

He's already reached a few key milestones; for one, figuring out how to separate aluminum, glass, and silver. Isolating each one and getting good purity has historically been hard to impossible because the materials are tightly fused.

For now, the Arizona-based operation sells what it extracts from defunct panels to companies that make products from it. But the team’s near-future aim is to make new products themselves— at least from the glass, which comprises most of the panels’ weight. Today that glass goes into lower-value building materials, but the plan is to make old panels into new ones. It will happen at the new Georgia campus, which will house both a solar glass manufacturing and recycling facility.
Landing a way to efficiently make like-new units is a big leap, Sharma says. And it’s been worth the investment both from an economic and environmental stand. 

“Today there are no solar glass factories for crystalline silicon panels in the U.S. And it makes no sense to ship them in from overseas because they are expensive, heavy, and carbon-intensive to transport. But we will take glass from our recycling facility, melt it in a furnace next door, and blend it with virgin material to make glass sheets for new panels.”

A partnership with tech giant Canadian Solar should help get this new project moving. The manufacturer will bundle recycling services with panels it sells, and when those panels are ready to retire, SOLARCYCLE will pick them up and process them.

Takeback programs for hard-to-recycle products generally are uncommon, unless they are government mandated.  For businesses to take on this task voluntarily is groundbreaking, Sharma says.

“It’s an interesting evolution for the solar industry in that it builds sustainability and circularity into the product at the point of sale. It brings the concept of end of life and recycling to the beginning of the process,” he says.

Finding the best way to work with decommissioned units is an ongoing job as better, cheaper technologies continue evolving. The latest is a thin film panel requiring a different recycling process and different equipment than used for silicon cell panels.  That’s what SOLARCYCLE is developing at its next-gen plant in Mesa while bracing for an influx of older systems.

A recent analysis projects that recyclable materials from solar panels will be worth upward of $2.7 billion by 2030, and close to $80 billion by 2050. Investors with well-line purses are paying attention.

Since its 2022 launch, SOLARCYCLE has raised over $70M from leading investors such as Fifth Wall, HG Ventures, Prologis, and Microsoft and was awarded a $1.5M grant from the Department of Energy.

“Transitioning to a net zero economy will require massive deployment of renewable energy at scale," said Brandon Middaugh, senior director of sustainability markets at Microsoft.

“It’s important to us that companies like SOLARCYCLE are developing innovative solutions to ensure that the raw materials required for this build out and deployment are returned to the supply chain.”

Sharma believes the next foray on the technology front will be learning to make products more recyclable in the first place.

“When you look at recycling a solar panel, there is good and bad. The good is most of the panel is glass, aluminum, silver, and copper which, theoretically, are very recyclable,” he says.

The “bad” is all the components are glued together with plastics, which adds robustness but makes them difficult to separate and get purity.

“We developed our technology to address this challenge. But it would be much easier if panels were made in a way where glass could be separated from metal without contaminants.”

As they work to take on these fast-amassing discards they are talking to manufacturers about upstream solutions and thinking about what they too can do.

“The industry will only continue to deploy solar. That's why we're focused on creating the recycling infrastructure, technology, and processes to not only recycle existing modules, but also on building the next generation of [recyclable] solar panels.”

About the Author

Arlene Karidis

Freelance writer, Waste360

Arlene Karidis has 30 years’ cumulative experience reporting on health and environmental topics for B2B and consumer publications of a global, national and/or regional reach, including Waste360, Washington Post, The Atlantic, Huffington Post, Baltimore Sun and lifestyle and parenting magazines. In between her assignments, Arlene does yoga, Pilates, takes long walks, and works her body in other ways that won’t bang up her somewhat challenged knees; drinks wine;  hangs with her family and other good friends and on really slow weekends, entertains herself watching her cat get happy on catnip and play with new toys.

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