Summary

SOLARCYCLE is a US-based solar panel recycling company founded on a simple but urgent premise: the clean energy transition is creating its own waste problem, and almost nobody has built the infrastructure to deal with it. Solar panels installed during the first wave of the renewable energy boom are now reaching end of life — and each one contains silver, aluminium, silicon, copper, and glass that are both valuable and recoverable. SOLARCYCLE has developed a proprietary recycling process that recovers up to 96% of a solar panel’s material value, producing high-purity outputs that feed directly back into domestic solar manufacturing rather than being downcycled or landfilled. The company operates six facilities across the US, recycled over one million panels in 2025, and is breaking ground on a 1.1 million square foot facility to produce recycled solar glass on American soil. Partners include Prologis and Illuminate USA, and investors include Microsoft. (Source)

Story

SOLARCYCLE was founded in 2022 by three solar industry insiders: Suvi Sharma, who had previously co-founded Solaria and spun out Nextracker; Jesse Simons, former National Program Director at the Sierra Club; and Pablo Ribeiro Dias, a photovoltaic recycling expert and engineering lecturer at the University of New South Wales. Between them, they had spent decades building and advocating for the solar industry — and recognised that end-of-life panels were a problem the industry had created but refused to look at. (Source)

Pic credit: Waste 360 (top) and BizJournals (right)