Solar Panel Recycling: Landfills, Robots and ABB

Solar panels are built to last 25 years or more, so for a long time almost none came back. Now weather damage, early upgrades and the first big solar farms reaching old age are sending more of them to the end of their lives, and solar panel recycling is growing into an industry of its own. This post covers how old panels were dumped or crushed with ordinary glass, the first dedicated plants, including Veolia's robot line in France in 2018, the robot-fed plant that has run around the clock in Nevada since September, and where ABB robots could fit.

Solar panels at the Vizag airfield in India, broken by Cyclone Hudhud in October 2014. Photo: Indian Navy / Wikimedia Commons (GODL-India)

How old solar panels went to landfills and cement kilns

Panels were built to take punishment. In 1979 engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory fired ice balls from half an inch to 5 inches across at solar panels to see how much hail they could take. In 1982 ARCO Solar built the world's first photovoltaic central utility power plant, a 1 MW facility near Hesperia, California. Panels are typically given lifespans of around 25 years, and today's are expected to stay in service for 25 to 35. The US Department of Energy says about 70 percent of the world's solar projects have been installed since 2019, so most panels out there are still young.

A 1979 test rig at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory that fired ice balls at solar panels to study hail damage. Photo: NASA/JPL via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

When panels did break or wear out, there was nowhere special for them to go. Reuters reported in 2018 that ageing or broken panels had typically gone to general glass recycling plants, which recovered only the glass and the aluminium frame, mixed the special solar glass in with other glass and often sent the rest to be burned in cement kilns. Nothing else in the panel was recovered. A typical crystalline silicon panel is 65 to 75 percent glass, 10 to 15 percent aluminium, about 10 percent plastic and only 3 to 5 percent silicon. In the United States around 90 percent of decommissioned panels still ended up in landfills as of 2023.

A Caterpillar 826C compactor working at an Australian landfill site. Photo: Ropable / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Dedicated recycling started with a manufacturer. First Solar, which builds thin-film cadmium telluride modules, says it set up the industry's first global solar panel recycling program in 2005, and it now recovers more than 90 percent of module materials. In a 2016 study the International Renewable Energy Agency estimated that recovered materials could be worth $450 million by 2030 and more than $15 billion by 2050. Two years later Veolia opened what it called Europe's first dedicated solar panel recycling plant, in Rousset in southern France. Robots there take panels apart to recover glass, silicon, plastics, copper and silver, under a contract with PV Cycle France for 1,300 tonnes in 2018, rising to 4,000 tonnes by 2022.

Washed and sorted glass cullet from a glass recycling plant. Photo: Alter Fritz / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Robot-fed recycling lines and new rules today

In September 2026 Comstock began running its solar panel recycling plant in Nevada 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Its chief executive, Corrado De Gasperis, told investors the plant can process 3.3 million panels a year through four ovens, with two robotic arms feeding panels in at a target pace of one every seven seconds or less. Out come clean aluminium, clean glass and tailings rich in silver and other minerals. Comstock plans to run at about 25 percent of capacity for several months to prove the economics, and it picked Nevada partly because older installations in California, Arizona and Nevada are reaching end of life.

ARCO Solar panels and reflective trackers on the Carrizo Plain, California, in the 1980s. Photo: Paul Gipe / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

More plants and rules are on the way. We Recycle Solar plans a 10-acre plant outside Dallas, due in the third quarter of 2027, that will process one panel per minute and recover up to 96 percent of the materials. In Alberta every new panel has carried a CAN$14 recycling fee since 1 October, landfilling panels is being ruled out, and the province calls its scheme the first of its kind in North America. New South Wales opened consultation in September on Australia's first mandatory scheme. Its environment agency says most end-of-life panels there are landfilled, stockpiled or illegally dumped, and the state expects its panel waste to grow from about 14,000 tonnes a year to 89,000 tonnes by 2045.

Rooftop solar panels on houses in a Canberra suburb, Australia, 2026. Photo: Benlisquare / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB has no solar panel recycling project, but its robots already handle solar modules. At dhp technology's factory in Zizers, Switzerland, an ABB IRB 6700-150 with a 3.2 metre reach and a 150 kg capacity picks up photovoltaic panels with suction cups, presses them onto steel frames, a cycle of about 160 seconds that was simulated in RobotStudio before production started in 2019. A recycling plant needs the reverse: lift a used panel off a stack, cut away the junction box and pull off the aluminium frame before the glass and cells are separated. In the common mechanical process, people still remove frames and junction boxes by hand. An arm like the IRB 6700 could take over that step, though ABB has announced no such project.

An ABB IRB 6700-150 lifts a photovoltaic module on dhp technology's folding solar roof line in Zizers, Switzerland. Photo: ABB

Where solar panel recycling goes next

Rystad Energy estimates that the recyclable materials in solar panels are worth around EUR 1.7 billion today and could reach EUR 69 billion by 2050. By its numbers, recycled silver could cover 21 percent of solar manufacturers' needs in 2035, while recycled copper would cover only about 2 percent. At the University of Newcastle in Australia, researchers used froth flotation, a mineral processing method, to recover close to 100 percent of the silver from cell material equal to 468 kg of rooftop panels in a continuous pilot. That silver sits in the cells, under the glass and plastic, so every panel has to be taken apart cleanly before anyone can get at it.

Microscope view of the silver paste where a finger meets a busbar on a heterojunction solar cell. Photo: Radiotrefoil / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Homeowners will meet all this as fees and collection rules. A new 20-panel home system in Alberta adds CAN$280 to the scheme, under 1.5 percent of the installation cost, and New South Wales has more than 1.18 million rooftop systems that will age over the next two decades. For factories the job looks like the high-volume handling ABB robots already do in solar manufacturing. At Absolicon in Härnösand, Sweden, two ABB robots build a solar collector every six minutes, against up to three a day by hand. Our post on solar module manufacturing covers the build side.

An ABB robot on Absolicon's solar collector production line in Härnösand, Sweden. Photo: ABB

Cost is the first problem. Research cited by pv magazine puts the cost of recycling a utility-scale module in the US at $15 to $45, against $1 to $5 for landfill, which is why bans and fees matter and why Comstock is testing its economics at a quarter of capacity. Variety is the second. Veolia's plant was not built for thin-film modules, and a gripper that picks clean new modules at dhp would have to cope with cracked and dirty ones. The fees themselves are contested: the Canadian Renewable Energy Association's Alberta policy director says the CAN$14 fee is more than five times the highest fee in the province's electronics recycling program.

The same ABB IRB 6700 at dhp technology holds a new module over a steel frame. Photo: ABB

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