To save solar panels from landfills, startup is smashing them instead

Solar panels on the roof of a building in Berlin. All over the world, people are trying to figure out how to handle waste from the energy transition. — dpa via AP

Inside a noisy industrial plant on the outskirts of Yuma, Arizona, there’s a machine that smashes old solar panels into bits. It can handle 10 panels a minute, as many as 7,500 a day, extracting bits of copper and silver and aluminium, and pulverising most of the rest into a gritty powder.

It’s the biggest US site for recycling old photovoltaic panels, according to We Recycle Solar Inc, a four-year-old startup that owns the plant. The company sees a growing business opportunity handling panels that would otherwise end up in a landfill. With potentially billions of panels needing disposal in the coming years, the market for recycled materials may reach US$2.7bil (RM12.90bil) a year by 2030, and US$80bil (RM382.40bil) by 2050, according to a report last year from Rystad Energy.