In the desert city, Yuma, where Arizona, California, Sonora and Baja California meet, North America’s first utility-scale solar panel recycling plant has opened to address what founders of We Recycle Solar call a “tsunami” of solar waste. Plans to address climate change rely on massively scaling up clean, solar electricity. The panels, stacked and banded, come here from the company’s main collection warehouse in Hackettstown, New Jersey, plus six other locations across the country. Workers maneuver the stacks into the sprawling 75,000 square foot facility on forklifts, then gently lift each out by hand to begin separating by brand and model. Some only have a few cracks in their glass, sometimes from storm damage.
These can be reused, said Adam Saghei, CEO of We Recycle Solar, and there is a market for them — clients around the world who search for refurbished panels for their affordability. The Yuma facility, he says, is like “your local thrift store that looks to upcycle.” Some have been sold for example at the store Mercados Solar in Carolina, Puerto Rico. Those that don’t go towards testing and resale head down a conveyor belt where glass, metals, and other materials with value are separated.
Solar panels are built to withstand decades of harsh weather, so it’s difficult to break the resilient bonding that keeps them together. Separating the glass without it shattering, for example, is a challenge. But with robotic suction arms assisted by workers, they come apart. Some of the highest value materials are copper, silver, aluminum, glass, and crystalline silicon. Repurposing these means finding new uses for them, such as selling glass to companies that do sandblasting.