Describe your image
Describe your image
Why Recycle Solar?
PV modules are a rapidly growing resource of secondary-source critical materials.
End-of-life (EOL) solar PV modules present a unique challenge to circularity-conscious and environmentally sensitive waste management efforts.  Ever-increasing quantities are discarded each year, with few options available for recycling. In addition to modules approaching the end of their 20-year service lives, tens of thousands of modules are damaged by severe weather events, annually. It is estimated that by 2030, the cumulative value of certain recoverable critical materials contained in EOL modules will be $450 million, equivalent to the material input currently needed to produce 60 million new modules. The primary challenge faced by the solar recycling industry is one of grade. That is, EOL modules contain proportionally large amounts of low-value material and a comparatively small amount of high-value material.
The problem, in numbers:
The U.S. could see 0.8–1.5 million metric tons of PV module waste by 2050 (roughly 7–12% of annual municipal e-waste). Most of this mass, ~95% of module material, is recyclable.​ Globally, the numbers are even more extreme - upwards of 5 billion end-of-life panels by 2050 - that's enough waste to cover 1.35 million American Football fields.
But the opportunity is clear:
The conventional solar recycling technologies used by our competitors are inefficient and expensive. Applying these recovery techniques to increasingly high-volume, low-value crystalline silicon PV modules isn't a recipe for sustainability, it's a recipe for ever-increasing recycling fees.
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The contained value of end-of-life PV modules is incredibly dilute:
The volume of 1,000,000 tons of PV waste could fill 3 separate 30-story high-rise office buildings. The primary materials of value, however, would only occupy 42 cubicles. That's a serious 'needle in a haystack' problem. This fact, in concert with the antiquated recycling techniques currently in use, is why our competition must charge a high processing fee.
This is where we stand apart:
With our technology, our go-to-market scale allows American Solar Recycling Company to offer solar recycling services at prices competitive with landfilling:
And, we do this while recovering 98% of the material value contained in an EOL solar PV module, using equipment designed, manufactured, and operated in America, by Americans.
