Crystalline silicon panels make up the vast majority of what arrives at solar recycling facilities today and are what most U.S. recyclers’ lines are set up to handle. But a meaningful share of the panels installed across the U.S. over the last two decades are cadmium telluride (CdTe) thin film, and those panels are now beginning to reach end of life in volume.
SOLARCYCLE already recycles cadmium telluride (CdTe) thin-film panels at end of life. Today, that service recovers the majority of a panel's economic value: the aluminum or steel frame, and the copper in the junction box. But there are some materials we haven’t yet been able to recover, and we want to do more. That gap has always been the hard part of CdTe recycling.
So, we’re excited to share an update on how we’re tackling this challenge, but first, let’s talk about why.
A CdTe module is almost entirely glass by weight. The active semiconductor layer that actually converts sunlight into electricity is only a few microns thick, spread across a few square meters. That material efficiency is a remarkable feat of science and manufacturing, and it's precisely what makes recycling hard.
Recovering that glass and semiconductor is technically possible. The problem is cost. Processing tons of low-value glass to extract a crumb of higher-value semiconductor material only works if the process is both environmentally acceptable and cheap enough that the recovered material is worth more than it costs to recover it.
We've been relentlessly working on the challenge of economically recycling cadmium telluride since the earliest days of SOLARCYCLE. Solving it has been a long-term R&D problem, and we’ve tried, and discarded, a lot of approaches that didn't pencil out.
One of SOLARCYCLE's advantages is how deeply R&D is rooted in the company. We have a core team of scientists and engineers, and our own in-house lab space built for exactly this kind of work. Like a test kitchen, instead of scaling up a promising idea straight to a commercial line and hoping it works, we can run dozens of small, fast, low-stakes experiments side by side, see what actually behaves the way the theory says it should, and kill the ideas that don't. That’s how we’ve been able to innovate at speed and design a promising new process.
At a high level: we take the laminate material that comes out of our existing CdTe recycling process, separate the glass layers, and run those glass pieces through a new, proprietary cleaning solution. Not only is that cleaning solution itself lower cost than existing alternatives on the market, it also mitigates formation of hazardous dust – a common pitfall of CdTe recycling processes that rely exclusively on mechanical separation. That cleaning step is where the semiconductor material gets separated from the glass, opening the door to semiconductor recovery.
Earlier this year, we moved this process out of the lab and onto a prototype system. That step matters because a lab process and a working process are different things. Prototype scale is where you find out whether concepts or chemistries that work in individual beakers work with real equipment and imperfect panel material, in a combined, step-by-step process.
Spoiler: it did.
So, this summer, we took the next step. We installed a pilot line, and we're currently running hundreds of panels through it. We’re also getting our products tested and validated by offtakers. This is the transition from R&D territory into something that starts to look like an operation – proving whether the process works repeatedly, at meaningful volume, with the reliability a commercial line demands.
We're excited enough about what we see coming off that line to share this with you. The video on our YouTube includes clips from our lab work, our prototype testing, and the pilot line install – a look at what it actually takes to get a new recycling process from idea to reality.
