(Bloomberg) -- Inside a crowded industrial plant near Yuma, Arizona, a machine destroys old solar panels. It can process 10 plates per minute and up to 7,500 plates per day, extracting bits of copper, silver and aluminum and grinding most of the rest into an acidic powder.
It's the largest old solar panel recycling plant in the United States, according to We Recycle Solar Inc., the four-year-old startup that owns the facility. The company sees a growing business opportunity in transporting panels that would otherwise end up in a landfill. With billions of panels likely to be discarded in the coming years, the market for recycled materials could reach $2.7 billion annually by 2030 and $80 billion by 2050, according to a Rystad Energy report last year.
We Solar Recyclers are at the forefront of this growing industry. There are more than a terawatt of solar energy installed worldwide, and researchers say that number will need to increase to 75 terawatts by 2050 to combat climate change. All installed systems will be scrapped sooner or later, says CEO Adam Sage. Thousands of old pallets are stacked at the Yuma factory, and on some days 10 trucks pass through the gates, each loaded with 400 to 800 more pallets. Although there has been a strong push to install solar panels around the world, little attention has been paid to what to do with the panels that are removed, he said.
“It's a great business model. We'll never run out of supplies,” Saji said. The company has already processed more than 500,000 plates and hopes to reach one million by the end of the year. “This problem is getting worse every year.”
People around the world are trying to figure out how to manage waste as part of the energy transition. Solar panels typically last between 25 and 30 years, although many are replaced sooner. In the United States, the pace of installation began to accelerate after the Department of Energy provided major tax incentives in 2005, so the panels currently being removed from electrical systems are just a trickle and will soon become a deluge, according to engineering professor Meng Tao. From Arizona State University.
“We are now seeing the first wave of waste,” said Tao, a fellow at the Global Institute for Sustainability and Innovation at Arizona State University who studies solar waste. "The number will be very large."
It is estimated that 90% of fallen boards end up in landfills, which is the cheapest option.
It costs between 50 cents and $1.80 apiece to transport old panels to a landfill, according to the Electric Power Research Institute, an independent research group. Taking the time and effort to sort and separate them and then collect all the useful materials can cost between $10 and $50 per plate.
We recycle solar energy using a multi-pronged strategy. Customers usually pay the company to remove old panels. If the panels still work, We Recycle Solar sells them. Otherwise it is dismantled and the raw materials can be sold. In both cases, customers get a share of the profits. Saji did not share the company's revenue, but said it was profitable.
We Recycling Solar can find new homes for about 60 percent of the panels it recycles and sell them for $160, Sagia said. This is much more than the $5 to $7 you can typically get for a basic product of spray-coated panels, although older panels can yield up to $15 because the industry demands more money for their products. The company has so far shipped used panels to six countries, including Turkey, Panama and Morocco, and said the potential secondary market is huge, especially in developing countries.
“The longer we can reuse these products, the better,” said Evelyn Butler, vice president of technical services for the Solar Energy Association trade group. “We have accumulated a large amount of garbage that we cannot handle.”
Recycling is starting to gain traction, but it's unlikely to gain traction without a political mandate, Butler said. There are no federal regulations for waste disposal. Washington state has a policy requiring environmentally sound disposal methods for panels starting in 2025, and several other states are studying the issue. But until there is greater legislative pressure, homeowners will likely toss the old panels in a landfill. At a recycling facility in Yuma, workers sort through all the pallets to determine which ones can be resold and which ones are just for their materials. They are put on a belt and put into a machine with three dozen hammers that crush them. The parts pass through a series of machines where they are sorted, screened, crushed and pulverized until the base materials are separated and ready for sale.
About 15% of the weight of each panel is aluminum, mainly the frame, and 70% is glass. In just a few weeks, the company was able to sell about 50,000 kilograms of aluminum for scrap metal. Copper and silver are more valuable, but less abundant. After going through the machine, one of the final products is acid powder, mainly glass, which can be sold to be used as sandblasting material.
We Recycle Solar is seeking financing to improve and expand its panel shredding system. The Yuma facility cost several million euros to build, and the company wants to make enough money to build four more facilities in the United States over the next three to five years. Sagi expects the demand for waste management services to increase. We will have to remove millions of panels in the coming years, and we want to be prepared for the next boom.
“We want everything,” he added.
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