Latest / The Manufacturing Podcast with Fexingo: Factories, Supply Chains, and Industrial Business / How a Swiss Factory Recycles Solar Panels into New Ones
Transcript
- Lucas: So there's this number that's been sitting in the back of my head for a while. By 2030, the world will have roughly eight million tons of dead solar panels that need to go somewhere. And right now, most of them go to a landfill. Luna: Eight million tons — that's like… 80 cruise ships' worth of glass and metal and silicon, just sitting in a hole. Lucas: Roughly, yeah. And the solar industry has a branding problem here because solar is supposed to be clean. But if every panel ever installed eventually becomes hazardous waste — because panels contain trace amounts of lead, cadmium, and silver — then the green halo starts to tarnish. Luna: So what's being done about it before we hit that wall? Lucas: There's a factory in Switzerland — in a town called Chavornay, about 30 minutes north of Lausanne — run by a company called SolCycle. They've built what they claim is the first fully commercial line that takes a dead solar panel and recovers 95 percent of its material content, and then feeds that material straight back into new panel manufacturing. Luna: 95 percent — that's way higher than the typical recycling rate for e-waste, which is usually in the 20 to 40 percent range. Lucas: Exactly. Most e-waste recyclers focus on copper and gold and basically shred everything and hope for the best. But solar panels are a layered sandwich — glass on top, a polymer encapsulant, then silicon cells, then a backsheet. You can't just throw them in a shredder. You get a low-grade mix that nobody wants to buy. Luna: So what does SolCycle do differently? Lucas: They built a multi-step mechanical and thermal process. First, they remove the aluminum frame — that's the easy part, that's pure scrap metal. Then they separate the glass from the polymer layer using a heated roller system that softens the encapsulant. Then they etch off the silver busbars — the thin silver lines on the cell — using a chemical bath that recovers the silver as a powder. Then they grind the silicon cells into a high-purity silicon grit that can be remelted into new wafers. Luna: So they're recovering silver, silicon, glass, and aluminum — four distinct revenue streams instead of one mixed mess. Lucas: Exactly. And the key metric is purity. The glass they recover has to be clean enough to remelt into new solar glass, which requires less than 50 parts per million of iron contamination. They claim they hit that. The silicon grit is 99.9 percent pure. That's the difference between a recycler and a refiner. Luna: What does the economics look like? Because recycling is usually more expensive than just dumping, especially when landfill fees are low. Lucas: That's the interesting part. SolCycle says their cost per panel — including collection, transport, and processing — is now roughly 8 percent lower than the cost of buying virgin glass, virgin aluminum, virgin silver, and virgin silicon on the open market. And that gap is widening as commodity prices rise. Luna: Eight percent doesn't sound huge, but for a panel manufacturer that's making millions of units a year, that's real margin. Lucas: It's real. And the Swiss government also taxes landfill disposal at about 120 Swiss francs per ton for this kind of waste. So the alternative — sending a panel to a landfill — actually costs more than recycling it. That's the policy nudge that makes the math work. Luna: I want to pause on something you said earlier — the silver recovery. Silver is expensive, and solar panels use a surprising amount of it. How much are we talking? Lucas: A typical 300-watt panel contains about 20 grams of silver. At current prices around 30 dollars an ounce, that's about 20 dollars' worth of silver per panel. SolCycle claims they recover 90 percent of that silver. So per panel, you're pulling out 18 dollars in silver alone. When you're processing 100,000 panels a year, that's 1.8 million dollars in recovered silver. Luna: That's not pocket change. And silver is also a finite resource — mining it is energy-intensive and environmentally destructive. So recovering it from old panels has a double benefit. Lucas: Right. And the silicon recovery is maybe even more strategic. Solar-grade silicon is typically 99.9999 percent pure — six nines. SolCycle's process gets to 99.9 percent, which isn't good enough for a new solar cell directly, but it's good enough to feed into the polysilicon production process as a feedstock, replacing some of the virgin metallurgical-grade silicon. That saves energy because you don't have to reduce silicon dioxide from scratch. Luna: What's the scale right now? Are they a pilot plant or are they actually producing at commercial volume? Lucas: They started commercial operations in early 2025. Currently they process about 10,000 tons of panels per year. They've announced plans to triple that by 2027 — to 30,000 tons annually. And they're building a second facility in southern Germany, near the French border, to handle expected volume from the European solar boom of the early 2020s, which is now starting to retire its first large-scale arrays. Luna: Let's talk about the European solar boom. A lot of panels were installed in Germany and Italy between 2009 and 2012, when feed-in tariffs were generous. Those panels have a 25- to 30-year lifespan, so they're not due for replacement until the late 2030s. But some are failing earlier — hail damage, microcracks, delamination — and some are being replaced early because newer panels are so much more efficient. Lucas: That's exactly the wave SolCycle is positioning for. They're running at about 40 percent capacity right now, so they have room to grow. And they've signed offtake agreements with three European panel manufacturers — I won't name them, but they're large — who have committed to buying the recovered glass and silicon at a fixed discount to virgin prices. That gives SolCycle revenue visibility. Luna: That's a smart move — it de-risks the recycling side and gives the manufacturers a guaranteed source of low-carbon feedstock. Some of those manufacturers are under pressure from their customers to report the carbon footprint of their panels. Using recycled materials dramatically lowers that. Lucas: Yeah. And this is the part that I think is genuinely interesting. If you're a large solar manufacturer, your carbon footprint is dominated by the energy used to produce polysilicon and to melt glass. Recycled silicon requires about 80 percent less energy than virgin silicon. Recycled glass requires about 30 percent less energy. So if you can source 30 percent of your glass and 10 percent of your silicon from recycling, your panel's carbon footprint drops by maybe 15 to 20 percent. That's a big marketing advantage in a market where European buyers increasingly care about that. Luna: And that's without even selling the panel. That's just the input side. So the question becomes: is this scalable globally, or is it a Swiss/German niche because of high landfill taxes and high electricity costs? Lucas: That's the million-dollar question. The European Union's new Waste from Electrical and Electronic Equipment directive, updated in 2024, now requires that 85 percent of the mass of a solar panel be recycled. That's a legal mandate. So eu based manufacturers and importers are on the hook. In the United States, there's no federal mandate — California is the only state with a solar panel recycling law, and it's fairly weak. So the economics are different. Luna: But there's a counterargument: the cost advantage that SolCycle claims — 8 percent cheaper than virgin — depends on commodity prices. If silver prices drop, or if silicon prices crash because Chinese overcapacity floods the market, the math flips. Lucas: That's true. And Chinese polysilicon prices did crash in 2024 — they fell about 60 percent. So the virgin silicon is very cheap right now. But SolCycle's model assumes that the price advantage will come more from the avoided disposal cost and the premium for low-carbon material than from the commodity price arbitrage. And that's a bet on regulation and consumer preference, not on metal markets. Luna: It's also a bet on volume. If they get to 30,000 tons a year, fixed costs per ton drop, and the margin widens. If they stay at 10,000, they're probably breaking even or losing money. Lucas: Exactly. And this is where the business story gets really interesting to me. SolCycle isn't a charity. They raised 40 million Swiss francs in Series B funding in early 2025 from a mix of impact funds and a large European utility. The investors are betting that the waste stream grows, the regulations tighten, and the technology gets cheaper. And the founders — they come from the solar industry, not from recycling. They know how panels are made, so they engineered a process that fits into existing supply chains rather than trying to create a new one. Luna: So they're not just recycling — they're manufacturing a feedstock. That's a different business model. Lucas: That's exactly it. They're a materials company that happens to start with waste. And I think that framing matters because it changes the conversation from 'how do we get rid of this stuff' to 'how do we make money from this stuff.' And that's the only framing that scales. Luna: Before we go further, I want to say something about why we're even able to talk about a factory in Switzerland on a show like this. We deliberately don't run ads on these episodes. No sponsors, no pre-rolls, no mid-rolls — just the conversation. And that's a choice we make every week because we think it keeps the focus on the subject, not on selling you something. If these conversations have moved your work forward in some small way, or if you just appreciate the ad-free approach, you can support that choice at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Lucas: Yeah. It's a small thing, but it makes a real difference for us. And it means we never have to tailor a topic to a sponsor's preference. So if you've gotten value out of the show, that's where you can pitch in. Luna: Alright, back to Switzerland. One thing I'm wondering about — what happens to the polymer encapsulant and the backsheet? You said they separate the glass, the silver, the silicon. But the plastic parts — the EVA, the backsheet — what happens to those? Lucas: That's the part they haven't fully solved yet. Currently, the polymer layer — it's a mixture of ethylene vinyl acetate and sometimes Tedlar — gets burned for energy recovery in a cement kiln. It's not recycled into new plastic because it's too contaminated and too mixed. So about 5 percent of the panel mass goes to incineration. They're working on a pyrolysis process that would break the polymer down into oil and gas, but it's not commercial yet. Luna: So that's the 95 percent number — 95 percent recovered by mass, 5 percent burned. That's still better than landfill, but it's not fully circular. Lucas: No, it's not. But it's a start. And the interesting thing is that the panel manufacturers themselves are starting to design for recyclability. Some are switching to backsheets that are easier to separate — polypropylene instead of fluoropolymer. A few are using a glass-glass design with no polymer backsheet at all, which makes recycling much simpler. So the incoming waste stream in ten years will be easier to process than today's. Luna: That's an important point — the problem gets easier, not harder, as the industry matures. But only if manufacturers actually adopt those designs. And right now, most are still optimizing for cost and efficiency, not recyclability. Lucas: That's the tension. And that's why regulation matters. The EU's Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, which took effect in 2025, now requires that solar panels sold in Europe meet certain repairability and recyclability standards. So manufacturers who want to sell in Europe have to design panels that can be taken apart. That's a huge lever. Luna: So the combination of regulation, rising commodity prices, and growing waste volume is creating a window for companies like SolCycle. But they're not the only ones. There's a company in France called ROSI that does similar silicon recovery. A Japanese consortium led by Mitsubishi is working on a different process. How does SolCycle differentiate? Lucas: They claim their process has the lowest energy consumption per panel — about 15 kilowatt-hours per panel, compared to 25 for some competitors. And they have the most granular output: they sell five distinct material grades rather than two or three. That gives them more revenue streams. But honestly, the market is big enough for multiple players. If we're really going to have eight million tons of dead panels by 2030, we need dozens of SolCycle-scale facilities globally. Luna: Let's zoom out for a second. The solar industry is on track to become the largest source of electricity generation by the early 2030s. But it's also going to generate a massive waste stream. Is the recycling infrastructure being built fast enough? Lucas: Short answer: no. The International Renewable Energy Agency estimates that by 2030, the world will need about 100 recycling plants of the size that SolCycle is building — 30,000 tons per year each — just to handle the panels that will be retired in that year. Right now, there are maybe 15 such plants globally. So there's a huge gap. But every new plant that comes online makes the next one easier to finance, because investors see a proof case. Luna: That's the classic chicken and egg problem for recycling infrastructure. You need volume to justify the plant, but you can't get volume without the plant. Lucas: Exactly. And SolCycle's strategy was to build the plant first, at a smaller scale, and then sign offtake agreements to guarantee demand for the output. That de-risks the volume side. Now they need the waste supply to grow, which it will, because panels are aging. It's a timing play. Luna: So what's the one thing you want listeners to take away from this episode? Lucas: I think it's that recycling isn't a moral choice anymore — it's becoming an economic one. When you can make a panel that's cheaper because it uses recycled materials, and that panel has a lower carbon footprint, and you're legally required to recycle the old ones anyway — that's a closed loop that makes business sense. SolCycle is one example, but the model is replicable. And that's the kind of manufacturing story I find genuinely hopeful.