Plans for the US’ “first end-to-end” solar PV critical materials recovery and recycling facility have been announced.
We Recycle Solar (WRS) – a dedicated solar PV recycling firm – plans to launch the facility near Dallas, Texas in Q3 2027. The company claimed that the “first-of-its-kind commercial-scale plant” will recover 96% of the silver, copper, silicon, aluminium and glass from decommissioned solar panels and process them for resale back into new US products.
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WRS, which is based in Arizona, said that its facility will be the first to conduct the entire recovery and processing operation in the US, rather than sending materials to overseas sites for “further recovery”. “The WRS plant will utilize a proprietary high-efficiency end-to-end critical mineral extraction process to achieve a throughput of one panel per minute, while bypassing the need for downstream smelting at overseas facilities,” the company said in an announcement.
“Solar panels contain the exact critical materials the US supply chain desperately needs, but until now, no American company has been able to recover their full resources at such scale or efficiency,” said Adam Saghei, founder and CEO of We Recycle Solar. “Through our advanced process, we are achieving true, comprehensive material recovery entirely on US soil, and retaining these critical materials—and the value currently being lost to Asian processing—within our domestic supply chain.”
In its announcement, the company claimed that “an estimated 90%” of the US’ decommissioned solar modules are either put in landfill or shipped to processing sites in Asia, where it claims a “significant share” of the critical minerals are recovered and removed from US supply chains.
The company also framed its announcement in the context of global competition for critical mineral resources, particularly between the US and China. It said that China’s changes to export licenses “have added further uncertainty to global silver markets, heightening concerns about critical material supply chain resilience and security.”
WRS said that materials like silver recovered from solar modules could be used in a variety of critical supply chains, not just returned to solar manufacturing. It highlighted silver, which is entering its sixth consecutive year of structural global deficits, as a material abundant in solar panels that could be used for “AI infrastructure, defence systems, electronics, and the power grid” as well as new solar manufacturing.
Earlier this year we heard that the solar industry could use up current global silver reserves within five years without greater recycling and technological changes. Yansong Shen, head of the solar recycling research operation at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia, told PV Tech Premium the solar industry could produce 78 million tonnes of waste by 2050.
Last week, a report from the IEA PVPS said that greater recycling efforts would be essential for sustainable solar PV growth and to lessen the industry’s impact on critical mineral supplies. In June, head of the Global Solar Council, Sonia Dunlop, told PV Tech Premium that solar recycling was an urgent concern for today’s industry.
There are already solar module recycling operations underway in the US, notably from Solarcycle and Comstock.
