The American company Solarcycle announced the construction of its third plant in the United States for recycling old solar panels. The Cedartown, Georgia facility will become the largest panel recycling center, beginning operations in mid-2025 with 2 million panels processed annually. 99% of materials will be recyclable. In 2030, the plant will annually recycle up to 10 million panels, or a quarter of those taken out of circulation in the United States.
Image source: UNSW
If the plans go ahead, the United States will not face the fate of becoming a dumping ground for used solar panels, which is happening in Australia today and threatens Germany by the end of the decade. Specifically, Solarcycle cooperates with 70 solar energy companies and is ready to recycle both single-sided and double-sided solar panels, which many of its business colleagues are not yet capable of.
The technological processes implemented at Solarcycle enterprises make it possible to recover about 99% of raw materials when recycling old panels. Obviously, most of the waste will be silicon raw materials, which, in fact, are solar panels. To reuse crystalline silicon glass, Solarcycle will build a plant next to the panel recycling plant to produce blanks for new silicon glass solar panels.
The company already has plants for processing solar panels in the cities of Odessa (Texas) and Mesa (Arizona). But the Cedartown plant will be the largest facility of its kind in the United States. When the two-plant Cedartown facility reaches full capacity, it will employ 1,250 people to maintain it.