A startup in Jacksonville, Florida, has a new way to recycle solar panels to recover the majority of materials that went into them, Canary Media reported.
OnePlanet Solar Recycling has been running a pilot facility and just finished a seed round of funding to collect $90 million for a full-scale plant to be completed in 2027. There, it will process 2 million broken solar modules per year, with plans to upgrade to process 6 million.
That's good news, because until now, discarded solar panels have presented a bit of a problem. The technology itself is vital to low-cost, clean energy plans for the future, as it generates free electricity for decades without causing air pollution like dirty energy sources. The world needs to do that if we want to get control of the planet's rising temperature.
The problem is, solar panels are hard to recycle effectively. They're made up of a number of different materials that are combined in ways that make them hard to fully separate. Worse, the wide variety of designs and sizes means recyclers can't just design a one-size-fits-all disassembly process; the approach must be re-tailored for each type of panel.
That's what makes OnePlanet's approach so effective: It starts with sorting.
"We're doing a lot of work before we actually feed the panels into the recycling line," said André Pujadas, OnePlanet's chief executive, per Canary Media. "We batch panels together so we can run campaigns to extract different types of materials, thereby optimizing the process and optimizing production and efficiency."
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That allows the company to recover glass, plastic, silicon, and up to 97% of aluminum and copper — just at a time when metal prices are set to surge because of tariffs on imports. A domestic recycling plant in this economic climate is in a good position to make great money.
The funding OnePlanet has received in its seed round "reflects our belief that solar module recycling is not only necessary — it is investable at scale, with durable tailwinds driven by regulation, economics, and resource security," said Ashlynn Horras, partner at venture firm Khasma Capital, which led the seed round, per Canary Media.
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