Sustainability In Your Ear: Building Solar Panel Recycling Capacity with SPR’s Brett Henderson

Glass makes up 62% to 70% of a solar panel’s weight, and as much as 80% of a bifacial module with glass on both faces. That single number explains most of what is wrong with solar panel recycling in the United States. The aluminum frame and the silver contacts are worth money. The glass mostly is not, so common practice is to pull the frame, shred everything behind it, and sell the mixed output as low-grade sandblasting grit or landfill cover. The EPA projects the country could accumulate up to 10 million metric tons of end-of-life panels by 2050, second only to China — roughly 393 million modules. And they are retiring now, not in 2050: broken during construction, shattered by hail, or pulled down in year 10 when a utility swaps a 200-watt module for an 800-watt one and quadruples output from the same land.

Our guest is Brett Henderson, co-founder and CEO of SolarPanelRecycling.com, or SPR. The company owns and operates plants in North Carolina, Georgia, and Texas, with a fourth opening in California this year, each built to run about a million panels a year and to scale to 3 million within six months when needed. SPR is a Solar Energy Industries Association-approved national recycler and partnered with SEIA on the first residential panel drop-off program in the country. Brett came to solar after 18 years in electronics recycling at Powerhouse Recycling, SPR’s parent company, and the business started in 2018 with a call from a longtime utility client that had 10,000 panels coming out of a power plant and nowhere to send them.

Brett is blunt about the economics: recycling a panel is a negative value proposition, because a panel is mostly glass and glass is cheap. What SPR sells is risk mitigation. Federal rules treat an end-of-life panel as hazardous until testing proves otherwise, most owners have no idea what is inside the modules they bought, and a utility loading thousands of them onto trucks takes on generator liability and Department of Transportation exposure. Aluminum and silver recovery subsidizes the rest. That cost has fallen 42% in 36 months at SPR, driven by rebuilt separation lines and steadier volume rather than any subsidy, and scale is what opens the end markets — a manufacturer will not retool a line for recycled glass cullet until a supplier can promise something like 160 tons of it every other week.

He is equally candid about the limits. Solar wafers require polysilicon at 6N purity, 99.9999%, and recovered silicon does not reach that grade at a price anyone will pay. The recovered glass is clean enough for foundries, but not for new module glass. A panel, in other words, does not yet close its own loop, and the discipline that matters is clean separation, sending each material to its best destination. He also points out the challenges in reusing early-retirement panels: utility-scale modules are too large for most rooftops, and a module’s UL listing lapses once it leaves its original application, which complicates putting it back on the grid.

On policy, Brett would take landfill bans plus bonding and insurance requirements at project permitting over extended producer responsibility. Washington’s producer takeback law is his cautionary example: enacted in 2017, its compliance deadline has slipped to 2031 after only one manufacturer filed an approved plan. Meanwhile SPR is financing capacity ahead of the wave, largely off its parent company’s balance sheet, so it will not have to turn away million-panel repowers while it builds. IRENA and IEA-PVPS estimate the materials in retired panels could be worth more than $15 billion globally by 2050, enough to build 2 billion new ones. Somebody has to build the receiving end of that system first. Learn more about SPR’s facilities and research at solarpanelrecycling.com — that’s all one word, no space, no dash.

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Interview Transcript

Mitch Ratcliffe (0:11)

Hello. Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are on this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition to a sustainable, carbon-neutral society, and I’m your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Today, we’re going to look at what happens when the clean energy grid ages out.

The United States has installed millions of solar panels, and we tend to treat them as though they’re all 30-year promises. Put them on a roof or in a field, reap the sun’s energy for decades, and the waste question belongs to, well, somebody who lives in the 2050s. But the data says otherwise. Panels are leaving service right now, broken during construction, shattered by hail or hurricanes, or pulled down in their first decade because the utility that owns them wants to repower. In other words, to put new, higher-efficiency modules in place because they pay better, and, in fact, it’s much more profitable than waiting to upgrade. So you swap a 200-watt panel for an 800-watt module, and you quadruple the output from the same land, which is why perfectly functional panels are coming to be retired by year 10.

And the EPA expects the country to accumulate as much as 1 million tons of solar panel waste annually by 2030, and as much as 10 million tons by 2050, the second-largest stockpile of end-of-life panels in the world. China is out front. Most of what passes for solar panel recycling today involves peeling off the aluminum frame and shredding everything else. Glass accounts for 62% to 70% of a standard panel’s weight, and as much as 80% of a two-sided module, and it is typically used as low-grade sandblasting grit or landfill cover instead of going back into a furnace and on to be reused in a new panel. The silver and silicon, while small in weight but large in value, disappear in that mix, and they’re lost for further use.

The International Energy Agency’s Photovoltaic Power Systems Programme estimates that recovering end-of-life panel materials and re-injecting them into the economy could deliver more than $15 billion in value by 2050, along with enough raw material to build 2 billion new panels. We could have a circular system that delivers consistently increasing output, that is, energy output, as panel materials are reused. And the industry we stand up over the next decade will decide whether that value is captured or ground into dust.

My guest today has spent the last eight years building the version of recycling solar panels that can capture those materials. Brett Henderson is co-founder and CEO of SolarPanelRecycling.com, known as SPR, which owns and operates recycling plants in North Carolina, Georgia, and Texas, along with a new California facility that’s slated to open this year. Each is built to process about a million panels annually and to scale toward 3 million within just six months when capacity is needed as more panels are retired. SPR is a Solar Energy Industries Association-approved national recycler, and it partnered with SEIA on the first residential solar panel drop-off program in the United States.

Brett came to solar after 18 years in electronics recycling at Powerhouse Recycling, which is SPR’s parent company, and there he built programs for Fortune 100 companies, government agencies, and universities. The company started in 2018 — that’s SPR — when a longtime utility client called with 10,000 panels coming out of a power plant and nowhere to send them. Brett draws a hard line between true recycling, that is, the clean separation of glass, aluminum, silicon, and the metals into commodities that can be remanufactured or used in remanufacturing, and the shredding and downcycling that often passes for responsible disposal, which he labels as greenwashing. He has seen the cost of recycling at the plant fall by 42% over just three years as technology improved and volume grew. He argues that the economics are approaching the point where a landfill stops being the cheap option on price alone, and getting there is a business design problem. You have to decide what to own, what to build ahead of demand, and how to turn yesterday’s clean energy into tomorrow’s raw materials.

So, let’s find out how you build that business after a brief commercial break. Stay tuned.

Brett Henderson, welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear. How are you doing today?

Brett Henderson (4:44)

Great. Thanks for having me, Mitch.

Mitch Ratcliffe (4:45)

Well, thank you for joining us, diving into solar panel recycling in anticipation of a growing wave of material that’s going to be coming down the pike. In 2018, a utility client showed up at your office with 10,000 panels and nowhere to send them. I’m wondering what made you think at that point that solar recycling could be a standalone business rather than just a service line within a larger recycling organization.

Brett Henderson (5:10)

Yeah, absolutely. So I still have a dual role at the parent company that was presented that opportunity. It’s Powerhouse Recycling. It’s been operating about two decades in the electronics recycling and IT asset disposition space. So one of our longtime utility clients at that time, in 2018 — so at that point, if I’m doing my quick math, we’d been servicing them about 15 years — did indeed come to us, and they were pulling out about 10,000 panels from a power plant they had. And they went to market and recognized at that time that there really weren’t any options, you know, locally within the state or even in the entire U.S. market at that time. And what I mean by that is aluminum harvesting was happening. You know, anything that has aluminum, a nice metal to it, you could probably present it to a metal yard, they’ll capture that, but then the other, more technical or challenging portions might just go to landfill.

So this particular utility of ours is, as most are, really under the microscope on their environmental sustainability initiatives. So they came to us and said, do you kind of want to tackle this project together? So, you know, to answer your question, when it was first presented to me, you look at everything for a client, to service them well. But, kind of in the back of my mind, and full disclosure, um, how many solar panels are really out there? So…

Mitch Ratcliffe (6:36)

Yeah, well, that’s the question. I mean, you’re way ahead of the wave.

Brett Henderson (6:40)

Yeah, right. So we started diving into this and started recognizing that, you know, maybe shift the mind from solar panels on the residential rooftops and go, how many of these utility-scale solar facilities are out there? And you start diving into the numbers and start recognizing, you know, hundreds of millions of panels, right? And then really dive back into where our flagship facility was at the time and still is, in North Carolina. I start diving into that data and recognize that North Carolina was fourth in installations in the entire country. So it really kind of intrigued us to start going down this path and looking into it, and that’s kind of when the R&D began, if you will.

Mitch Ratcliffe (7:21)

Now, most panel recycling focuses on the metal, the aluminum that you mentioned a moment ago. But there’s glass, there’s silicon, there’s silver, and other materials. What’s the value of a panel, and where does that value come from?

Brett Henderson (7:35)

Yes. So you’ll hear a lot, whether it’s us speaking at trade shows or some of our marketing materials, or if it’s even behind closed doors when we’re really doing the environmental audits with our clients — really, this whole industry, it’s all about the glass. So in any recycling medium, you really need to look at what’s the composition of that item, that widget you’re trying to recycle, right? So in the electronics recycling world, where our parent company still lives today and my entire 18 years in the recycling industry has lived, there’s a wide range of compositions depending on what that electronic is. But when you really look at the solar side of things, it’s glass, right?

So a single-sided solar panel, which means glass on one side — if you flip it upside down, you’ll see the plastic backsheet — it’s anywhere between 62% to 70% glass by weight. Bifacial modules, which are the newest technology being installed at the moment, where there’s glass on both sides — it allows them to be a bit more efficient because they could capture sun from both ways — the composition could be up to 80%.

So the aluminum frame indeed matters. It helps drive the cost per module that you’re hitting at. The silver recovery indeed matters. But really, the glass is where it all lays. If you cannot recover the glass cleanly without contaminating it with silicon and silver and other metals, or the plastic backsheet, or the encapsulant, then how can you charge yourself with the mission of being a recycler if that portion is kind of being skipped just to get the low-hanging fruit, which is aluminum? So the module value comes from the aluminum and derives from the silver that’s recovered, but that’s helping subsidize the overall cost of recycling a panel, which is typically always going to be a negative value proposition because it’s mainly glass, right?

Mitch Ratcliffe (9:30)

That’s an interesting point, that it’s a negative value proposition. It’s not the kind of pitch you would normally make for a business. So how do you describe what SPR is selling? Is it a disposal service for the asset owner? Is it a commodity that you’re providing as a feedstock to manufacturers? Or is it providing compliance information? Or all three?

Brett Henderson (9:52)

A little of all three. I mean, what we kind of present it as is risk mitigation, right? And it’s not just risk mitigation from an environmental perspective, which we’ll dive into. It’s not just risk mitigation on a project timeline occurring or staying on track. And it’s not just risk mitigation on DOT compliance when you transport panels from facility to landfill, or facility to, hopefully, a recycler like us. So all of these things are important. So that’s really what you’re selling.

I give the analogy of a cardboard box, right? Cardboard can be recycled, should be recycled. A lot of households, a lot of businesses choose not to, because there’s not a whole lot of risk if you throw it in the landfill. There’s not regulation against it. You’re not worried about hazardous waste or universal waste being t