A sustainable, waste-free solar industry may be cultivated through solar panel recycling. This week, we spoke to Dr. Pablo Dias, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of SOLARCYCLE about how solar panel recycling can play a role in reducing environmental challenges of renewable energy.
As the global transition to clean energy accelerates, scaling solar infrastructure has emerged as one of the most critical pathways to achieving a net-zero future. However, this rapid buildout could bring an increasingly large amount of waste as solar panels reach their end of life. To avoid this, recycling offers a dual climate solution: it significantly reduces the greenhouse gas emissions associated with primary mining and provides a supply of pre-refined, low-carbon materials that can be used to make new panels.
Transitioning away from fossil fuels and achieving net-zero carbon emissions at a global scale requires rapid deployment of renewable technologies. For solar energy specifically, the amount of solar infrastructure needed on Earth to meet climate goals is about 16 times what has already been built. This buildout demands large quantities of raw materials, including glass, silica sand, silver, copper, and aluminum. While these resources are traditionally mined from the Earth, they can also be recovered directly from solar panels once they reach their end-of-life.
Extracting and processing raw materials for solar panels through primary mining is resource-intensive, and recycling those materials significantly reduces the panels’ manufacturing emissions. Similarly, integrating recycled solar glass cullet into manufacturing lowers furnace operating temperatures, cutting energy consumption by 2.5% to 3% for every 10% of cullet added and reducing the overall energy and emissions needed to produce new glass.
If solar panels are taken to traditional e-waste recycling facilities, these sites typically rely on bulk shredding, a process that destroys material purity and scatters valuable metals. In contrast, the solar recycling process from SOLARCYCLE uses a step-by-step “reverse manufacturing” sequence in which the company strips away the junction box, removes the aluminum frame, and isolates the specialized glass to recover up to 97% of a panel’s material value. Furthermore, because solar manufacturing has evolved to generate more energy using fewer materials, the elements recovered from decommissioned panels can be the basis to build newer, higher-efficiency arrays that generate even more clean power.
Solar panel recycling requires dramatically less energy input, potentially avoiding up to 95% of the CO2 emissions and 95% of the energy needed to mine and process raw aluminum for new solar panels. What’s more, this technology can recover up to 99% or more of key materials like glass and metals.
Likewise, because this solution recovers critical resources like silver and copper from existing infrastructure, the technology can be used to mine materials from what has already been produced and collected rather than extracting new minerals from the Earth. This means the technology has the potential to eliminate up to 25% of manufacturing emissions for specialized solar glass, while diverting toxic chemicals like lead and cadmium away from landfills to protect environmental and human health.
Currently, panels have not been designed for recyclability, making the process of separating their tightly sealed layers a technical challenge. Because solar manufacturers operate on very thin or negative profit margins, they have rarely prioritized design-for-recyclability features, leaving decades of panels that will need specialized, intensive processing when they decommission. Scaling this technology also presents operational challenges because, while recycling thousands of panels is manageable, processing the millions of units at scale will require tooling that a supporting industry cannot yet provide.
Solar panel recycling currently struggles to compete economically with traditional waste disposal depending on local geography. In countries like the United States, landfill remains the cheaper option, creating a financial gap that can deter asset owners from recycling the panels. Moreover, the process cannot yet achieve a fully circular loop for all components. Certain materials, like thermoset plastics, are unrecyclable and must be diverted to waste-to-energy processes. Finally, the industry faces regulatory risks from “sham recycling”, where bad actors take upfront payments but fail to manage the materials properly, creating an environmental hazard by exposing toxic lead or cadmium to the soil.
Pablo Dias sees solar panel recycling as an essential part of the energy transition. For him, this process closes the loop on a true circular economy by allowing discarded panels to be mined for valuable resources like aluminum, silver, and copper instead of extracting raw materials from the Earth. This is part of a broader vision for a waste-free solar industry, turning end-of-life solar panels into a tool to drastically reduce the industry’s emissions and eliminate the environmental and social risks of heavy metal leaching.
Dr. Pablo Dias is the Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of SOLARCYCLE, a recycling platform designed to build a circular economy for the solar industry.
For a transcript of this episode, visit https://climatebreak.org/recycling-solar-panels-with-pablo-dias/
Ethan: I’m Ethan Elkind, and you’re listening to Climate Break– climate solutions in a hurry. Today’s proposal? Reducing emissions from manufacturing solar panels by recycling them and recovering metals like silver, silicon, and copper. We spoke to Pablo Dias, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of recycling company SOLARCYCLE.
Pablo: We need to deploy way more of the renewable energy technologies that we know. The amount that we need solar-wise to be able to achieve net zero is anywhere from 10 to 20 times what we already have deployed. That’s a significant challenge. And all those materials that we need to make solar panels, they can be mined from Earth, or they can be mined from materials we already have.
Ethan: But building that much solar requires a significant amount of raw materials. Dias believes that recycling the panels can reduce their manufacturing footprint.
Pablo: One kilogram of aluminum recovered from scratch to make a final product versus one kilogram of aluminum from an end-of-life solar panel… you bypass 95% of the CO2 emissions, which is a monstrous achievement. Beyond that, the amount of electricity, amount of energy required is also in the order of between 90 and 95% reduction.
Ethan: Dias says that recovering the raw materials from used panels lets consumers get more energy out of them.
Pablo: We can take an old solar panel that has all the components that we need to make a new solar panel, which is quite amazing, right? ‘Cause the amount of glass is less, the amount of silicon is less, the amount of aluminum is less, and so with one old panel, you can make a new panel that produces more energy today.
Ethan: SOLARCYCLE is trying to lead the way to a waste-free solar industry and make it an example for other industries.
Pablo: Imagine a future in which the solar industry is not needing to extract anything else from Mother Earth, but taking everything that it needs from end-of-life devices.
Ethan: To learn more about solar panel recycling, visit climatebreak.org.