Italian solar equipment manufacturer Ecoprogetti has announced that it has deployed a solar PV module recycling plant in Sale, northern Italy.
The plant, installed at a facility operated by Raee.man, a subsidiary of Italian waste management company Haiki+, has been in operation since the beginning of 2025, and Ecoprogetti announced its work last week. The recycling process involves a fully automated line that can process up to 120 panels per hour, which translates to around 700,000 tons of recycled modules per year. Since the start of operations last year, the facility has posted an uptime of 94%.
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The facility uses a technology patented by Ecoprogetti that allows for the complete removal of glass from PV modules prior to recycling, which the company describes as a “crucial step” in the manufacturing process, as this eliminates the chance that glass can contaminate the module’s silicon, which would make it difficult to recover and reuse the silicon.
Earlier this year, PV Tech spoke to Dr Malte Vote, co-author of an International Energy Agency Photovoltaics Power Systems Programme (IEA PVPS) report into material supply chains, who said that the growing need for silicon will be a “key demand factor” as solar deployments expand worldwide. In this context, demonstrating techniques to recover silicon, and secure a resilient supply of the material, is a priority for the global solar sector.
“Photovoltaics is one of the key sectors of the energy transition, but its growth must be accompanied by concrete industrial solutions for the end of life of modules,” said Haiki+ managing director Giovanni Rosti.
Ecoprogetti also says that this glass removal process is based on a “contactless air technology,” which means glass can be removed without the use of chemicals or tools, such as cutters and blades. The company says that this means materials such as glass and copper can also be “recovered and reintroduced” from modules.
“The technology installed in Sale represents a tangible leap forward compared to previous solutions, because it makes it possible to process large volumes while reducing machine downtime and improving the quality of the recovered fractions,” said Marco Manfron, Ecoprogetti managing director, of the company’s new recycling plant in Italy.
This process is part of a broader push towards building a circular economy in the solar industry; Ecoprogetti described efforts to improve end-of-life processes for PV modules as a “strategic sector for the energy transition” last week. Already this year, recycling projects have advanced in the US states of Nevada and Texas and the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW) has opened a consultation on what it describes as the country’s first mandatory solar module recycling scheme.
The news follows Ecoprogetti’s installation of a module manufacturing plant in Oman last December, which will be operated by local company American Advanced Clean Energy (AACE) and produce tunnel oxide passivated contact (TOPCon) and heterojunction (HJT) modules.
