In 1968, the U.S. government passed the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, designating the first eight free-flowing rivers as protected — the Rio Grande, Rogue, Clearwater, St. Croix, Eleven Point, Idaho’s Salmon and Wolf Rivers.
Today, there are 226 wild and scenic rivers and streams covering more than 13,4000 miles in the national Wild and Scenic Rivers System. In partnership with the public, the U.S. Forest Service works to protect the water quality and free flowing nature of these waterways, as well as safeguard them from development, overuse and other destructive impacts.
Here are some of the country’s most spectacular wild and scenic rivers you might want to explore on your next outdoor adventure.
Snake River, Wyoming, Idaho & Washington
Designated as a Wild and Scenic River in 2009, the Snake River flows 1,078 miles through the mountains, valleys and grasslands of Washington, Idaho and Wyoming, where it originates. It flows through Yellowstone National Park, as well as the cities of Idaho Falls, Twin Falls, Boise, Jackson and Lewiston, with spectacular views from the Hells Canyon gorge.
“While cruising my motorcycle down through the Hell’s Canyon area of the Snake River on a hot summer day, I literally felt like I was being poured into one of the most memorable and vivid displays of nature’s beauty that I can remember. The canyon walls, steep elevation changes and the winding road itself made for a magnificent and memorable experience, and I remember thinking to myself as I roared down the road, ‘This is exactly why I ride,’” Harley rider and nature enthusiast Patrick Roat told EcoWatch.
The Snake River empties into the Columbia River — which forms the border of Oregon and Washington — and is its largest tributary. While it was once the spawning grounds of over two million wild steelhead and salmon, these species are now threatened or extinct in the Snake River and its tributaries. Their biggest threat are four dams — built in the 1960s and ’70s — upstream of the lower 48 states’ biggest freshwater salmon habitat.
A federal court-ordered review was done by the government in 2016 of whether to keep the outdated dams in place, and the decision was to keep them intact.
“As scientists, tribes, and fishermen all warned, these four dams decimated the Snake River’s salmon and steelhead. The four dams transformed the Lower Snake River into a series of warm, shallow lakes where predators, dam turbines, and hot water kill too many migrating salmon,” Columbia Riverkeeper wrote.
The lives of Snake River steelhead and salmon begin in the mountains of Washington, Oregon and Idaho, before the young fish head to the ocean. They spend several years there before traveling the more than 900 miles to the Salmon River’s headwaters in Idaho. There they spawn at the highest elevations of any steelhead or salmon on Earth.
“The Snake cuts through my hometown of Idaho Falls. I love that river and the falls — once natural but now a source of hydroelectricity. I remember Terry Tempest Williams saying something about how the kind of water we grow up around profoundly affects us, imprints itself upon us. She was talking about the Great Salt Lake, but I was thinking while she was talking about my Snake. I grew up admiring that river but also fearing her, like a wild and strong mother. She mesmerized me and terrified me. On the surface the Snake is so seemingly placid, but she’s also fast. And underneath, there is so much happening because of the rocky river bottom, the pull of the undertows,” writer and teacher Carissa Neff told EcoWatch.
When visiting the Snake River region, you can expect to see plenty of wildlife, including moose, elk, pronghorn, mountain goats, American beavers, North American river otters, marmots and coyotes. Approximately 300 bird species grace the skies of the area around the river, from eagles and osprey to the great gray owl, peregrine falcon, calliope hummingbird and trumpeter swan.
There are a variety of campgrounds along the river, including the Miracle and Banbury Hot Springs, which feature geothermal hot springs, a massage center and kayak rentals.
Rogue River, Oregon
Juliana Statius Muller rowing a purple whitewater cataraft on the Rogue River. John Jones
At 215 miles long, the lower portion of Oregon’s Rogue River was one of the original Wild and Scenic Rivers Act designations of 1968. The wild and scenic Lower Rogue River runs 84 miles from the Applegate River mouth — about six miles from Grants Pass — to the Lobster Creek Bridge.
The Rogue originates in the Cascades on Mt. Mazama’s western slopes — not far from Crater Lake National Park — before emptying into the Pacific at Gold Beach. The river is famous for its whitewater rafting and salmon and steelhead runs.
A war between white settlers who had come to the region during the Gold Rush and members of the Takelma, Athabaskan and Oregon Shasta Native American Tribes resulted in Tribal members being forced from their land onto reservations in 1856. Their descendants are members of today’s Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde and Siletz.
In addition to Chinook and coho salmon, green sturgeon, steelhead and cutthroat trout, the Rogue is home to Roosevelt elk, black bears, otters, black-tailed deer, American beaver, ospreys, green herons, great blue herons, red-winged blackbirds, Steller’s jays, woodpeckers, Canada geese, kingfishers and bald eagles.
Among the many hiking options along the river, the 40-mile Rogue River National Recreation Trail will take you along its wild and scenic section from Grave Creek to Big Bend. Along the trail you will have opportunities to encounter spectacular waterfalls, wildlife, wildflowers and historical sites.
Other trails along the Rogue River include the 1.1-mile Redwood Nature Trail loop that begins near Brookings, Oregon; the 9.5-mile Wagner Butte Trail — an out-and-back hike near Ashland; and the moderately difficult 0.8-mile out-and-back National Falls Creek Trail near Prospect, Oregon.
The Wild Rogue Wilderness canyon that surrounds the river gives watershed protection for its wild and scenic portion, which features vertical cliffs with sharp-edged ridges. Here you’ll find striking geological formations, old-growth forests and pristine meadows with wildflowers like redwood sorrel, wild ginger, mock orange and red flowering currant.
Large cedar, Shasta red fir and white fir trees hug the upper portion of the river, while broadleaf evergreens, a variety of conifers and deciduous trees grow further downstream. The whole Rogue River canyon is populated by enormous Douglas fir, ponderosa pine, Jeffrey pine, oak, manzanita and madrone trees.
Another of the many wonderful things about the wild and scenic section of the Rogue River is that — in addition to many unmarked, established campsites — camping is allowed anywhere along the river that is “physically suitable for your group,” according to the Bureau of Land Management.
“Around the second half of October each year, the Wild and Scenic section of the Rogue River might include some fun Halloween surprises – in the form of cute miniature pumpkins. The pumpkins start appearing on mid-channel rocks on both sides of the river between Alameda campground and Foster Bar. I have yet to see who places the pumpkins, but it is really fun to see a little pumpkin on a rock in the middle of a rapid, right where you need to make a move with your oars,” adventurer Sarah Strock told EcoWatch.
McKenzie River, Oregon
My favorite river in Oregon, the stunning McKenzie River was given wild and scenic status in 1988. It originates in the Central Cascade Mountains at Clear Lake, flowing southwest through Willamette National Forest.
The cool, clear McKenzie runs beneath cedar, pine and maple trees. And on sunny days, the dappled river flows over the millennia of cobbles and hardened lava of the ancient riverbed.
The upper portion of the McKenzie River Basin was shaped by volcanic activity and lava flows that formed waterfalls, pools and whitewater. Clear Lake was carved out by a basaltic lava flow, and lava flows also created the river’s Koosah and Sahalie waterfalls. These aspects of the river provide magnificent views for hiking and kayaking, as well as extraordinary whitewater rafting.
The McKenzie is home to a host of fish species, including wild spring Chinook salmon and native rainbow, cutthroat and bull trout.
The McKenzie River National Recreation Trail offers 26 miles of spectacular “easy” level hiking for all ages and recreational opportunities along the river, including 11 trailheads, campgrounds and views of Tamolitch, Koosah and Sahalie Falls.
Close to the McKenzie River National Recreation Trail is the McKenzie Bridge Campground, which offers 20 campsites tucked beneath western red cedar and Douglas-fir trees, all with river access.
Klamath River, Oregon & California
Another magical Western U.S. waterway — added to the National Wild & Scenic Rivers System in 1981 — is the Klamath River. The 257-mile blue-green river originates on a plateau in South-Central Oregon, east of the Cascades. Underground springs swell from cracks in the volcanic rock, feeding the river. Other sources include the Williamson, Sprague, Wood and Sycan rivers, Upper Klamath Lake and the region’s wetlands and marshes.
The Klamath River Basin stretches through parts of six Oregon and California counties and has been the territory of several Native American Tribes — including the Shasta, Hupa, Klamath, Yurok and Karuk — for thousands of years. The river’s once-plentiful salmon were harvested by the Tribes sustainably using weirs.
There are currently dams on the Klamath River that block salmon habitat and create water quality issues, but they are scheduled to be removed, and one has already been taken down. In addition to coho and Chinook salmon, the glittering river supports populations of steelhead trout whose populations have been cut by approximately 95 percent.
“Four dams along the Klamath River, which runs from Oregon into northwestern California, are scheduled to be removed in 2023 and 2024 – Copco No. 1, Copco No. 2, Iron Gate, and JC Boyle. These dams total 400 vertical feet and choke fish passage along hundreds of miles of waterways, making this a historic opportunity and one of the largest dam removal projects to date. And construction has started!” the American Rivers said.
Some of the more than 430 species of wildlife — including 263 types of birds — who call the Klamath River Basin home include elk, antelope, pronghorn, black bears, cougars, mule deer and river otters. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, as well as the states of California and Oregon, have designated dozens of these species “at risk” or “of concern” due to shrinking populations and habitat loss. As the largest freshwater wetlands found west of the Mississippi, the basin is essential for the region’s fish and wildlife.
The Klamath River rushes through several wilderness areas and national forests on its journey west and south, including Klamath National Forest in Oregon and Six Rivers National Forest in California.
This wild and scenic river has hundreds of trail miles to hike — including the nine-mile Klamath River Trail loop and the Pacific Crest Trail, which crosses the river near the town of Seiad Valley, California — as well as five wilderness areas nearby.
The post 4 Must-See Wild & Scenic Rivers in the U.S. appeared first on EcoWatch.
https://www.ecowatch.com/wild-scenic-rivers-us-ecowatch.html
Green Living
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.
- Subscribe to Sustainability In Your Ear on iTunes
- Follow Sustainability In Your Ear on Spreaker, iHeartRadio, or YouTube
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 transported incorrectly. You’re not really even worried from a PR perspective of someone coming to your facility and saying, “Why aren’t you recycling your cardboard?” But when you flip that on the panel side — this is the service we’re selling and what our industry is selling — solar panels have a wide range of compositions to them. Some could be classified hazardous. Most, you do not have the information. So as it stands today, from a federal level, it’s deemed hazardous until proven otherwise.
So the option and the ability to just load up thousands and thousands of solar panels from your utility site, put them on a truck, transfer them to landfill, and dump them is opening up all sorts of generator liability. It’s opening up the DOT risk on how you transport and tag waste. So these are all the things that are why this service is being presented, and why a utility or an energy company is willing to be charged for that service.
Mitch Ratcliffe (11:35)
You’re describing a lot of different panel chemistries, a lot of different physical configurations. That requires a lot of specialized equipment. How do you maintain full utilization of that so that you’re actually earning the return you’re expecting?
Brett Henderson (11:49)
Absolutely. So, quite a few different ways. You know, first and foremost, R&D has to be ongoing, right? So the way a panel is being manufactured now, or even a future panel that is still in that manufacturer’s R&D phase, could be a wildly different composition, size, and technology than what’s hitting our recycling stream now. So we have a very strong team. It’s led by Finley Collins, our circularity research analyst, and she is consistently looking at what’s in the stream now, what is upcoming, and maybe even what are some of those technologies that are currently in the lab setting, so we could really be a bit proactive on what are going to be the challenges that are upcoming.
Then that has to coordinate — and part of my role as a quarterback of all of this — coordinate with our actual operations team and our engineers that have the current technology. Okay, our current recycling technology in our North Carolina plant, our Georgia plant, our Texas plant, our California plant that’s getting set to open: how is that going to handle the current panel compositions hitting the stream now, and ones that our clients are installing? Because, again, installation breakage could put a very new technology into the recycling stream right away. So it’s this juggling act and this balancing act to continuously invest, research, and make sure that you have opportunities to offer recycling for all panel types.
Mitch Ratcliffe (13:17)
Design for recyclability is really where we need to go as an economy more broadly. But if you could sit down with panel manufacturers today and say, you know, build it this way, we can recover a lot more material, what would you advise them to do? How would you suggest simplifying the designs for better recyclability?
Brett Henderson (13:35)
Yeah, this is a question that’s asked often, not just in the solar manufacturing and recycling spaces when they merge, but really dating back to, you know, you can look at car manufacturers and the right to repair, and electronics manufacturers. And it’s always a challenge for a recycler to really have that leverage and push that manufacturer to have those discussions, mainly because they have a duty to their stakeholders and their shareholders to make sure they’re manufacturing a product that lasts, manufacturing a product that meets consumer needs and is durable, right? So we’re kind of that person on their right shoulder, in their ear, that they kind of probably want to ignore a little bit at times.
That being said, on the solar space, there has been some level of engagement from some manufacturers. But how it stands now is, the United States needs a whole lot of power. That’s no mystery, you know, with data centers and AI really driving that, and then all sorts of the building and expansions. Anyone that could produce any type of energy really is holding the cards at the moment, and they have this core focus to meet demand and get panels, in this instance, out into the field to help support power needs. So as it stands now, there’s not a whole lot of leverage or thought put into that.
And the challenging part with solar is, it needs to be durable. It’s supposed to withstand extreme hail events, wind events, hurricanes, all sorts of natural disasters, or even just regular weather events. So by design, it needs to almost be challenging to break apart, right? And now analyze the problem when it comes to a recycling facility: our whole goal is to break it apart to all raw commodities and get those back into the stream. So there’s obviously wildly opposite goals and conflicting goals there that make that a challenge. Now, that being said, what we do have quite a bit of talks with the manufacturers about, and see some willingness to, is the information of the panel, which is still lacking and could really help be proactive in recycling.
Mitch Ratcliffe (15:42)
You mean in the product passport sense?
Brett Henderson (15:44)
Yeah, in a few different senses. One is a TCLP test, right? Would manufacturers be willing to say, this particular make and model, here’s its characteristics? Now we know it needs to be classified hazardous, or it doesn’t need to be classified hazardous. Because as it stands now, we have to get a physical panel from the field from one of our clients — knowing that they’re having an upcoming event or repower, or they just have some backlog ready to recycle — and we have to bring that in, grind that down, if you will, and get it to a lab to understand how to classify it, to really be compliant with DOT rules and all sorts of regulations. So a manufacturer could really assist in allowing the recyclers, and even the asset owners, to know what this panel is comprised of. Does the lead pass TCLP? Does it not pass TCLP? So you could classify this as waste when it comes to end of life.
And a second piece of information that could be super helpful is, again, we talked at the front end of this conversation how aluminum recovery and silver recovery is really what subsidizes the recycling costs. That determines if a panel is five to $7 to recycle, or higher or lower. So understanding the silver and some of the other metals that were utilized, by parts per million or by grams per metric ton — understanding the composition of that panel could also help make recycling costs more competitive, and then also help divert more panels from landfill to the recycling stream.
Mitch Ratcliffe (17:21)
Well, SPR owns and operates all four of the facilities that you operate, and you don’t broker materials out to scrapyards or haulers or anybody. I have to say, you know, ownership is obviously capital intensive, but what does vertical integration buy you that you couldn’t get from a network model?
Brett Henderson (17:39)
Yeah, seamless service is first and foremost. And what I mean by that is, let’s talk about repowers here. Let’s talk about installations. Really, it’s the same bucket, but we’ll do this under the guise of repower. So a repower is when a utility or an energy company is going, we have 100,000 panels in our field, they’re 200-watt panels, you can now get an 800-watt panel. So the math maths out for us to pull these panels out, you know, maybe much earlier than the 25-year span that they’re kind of advertised for, so we could get a four-times power generation there.
It’s a major undertaking. They’re going to do it in stages, so a lot of times the site doesn’t have to ever completely shut down. So why does end of life matter in that instance, and why does vertical integration matter? Is, they really need seamless service. If they have 20 truckloads of new panels arriving that day, and their contractor has 20 truckloads of old panels that need to go out that day — it’s not a warehouse, there’s not loading docks — there’s a lot of seamless service from a logistical standpoint that could really have high cost to a customer for not going off seamlessly. So us controlling that logistical network is just one of four or five reasons why this owned-and-operated model is very helpful to our clients.
Mitch Ratcliffe (18:58)
Does it make sense to start thinking about this as a full lifecycle integration opportunity? Should you be part of a panel company, or panel companies be co-invested across a variety of processors like you?
Brett Henderson (19:10)
I believe that we won’t probably see it get to that point. And if I understand your question, what maybe you’re hitting at here is circularity in the sense that the commodity comes from the panel and goes directly into panel manufacturing. Is this what you’re…
Mitch Ratcliffe (19:26)
Yeah, essentially stewardship of the material over many generations.
Brett Henderson (19:30)
Yeah. So, you know, I can’t speak for manufacturers if they want to get into the recycling space or partner directly with a recycler under some sort of joint venture, but I don’t see it having value to a manufacturer in terms of cost savings of getting a material recovered from a solar panel and put back into manufacturing. And the reason for that is the polysilicon that’s used to make the wafer itself. So obviously the panel can’t work if you don’t have good solar wafers. That has to be manufactured at a 6N purity, and that basically means 99.9999%. That’s where the 6N comes from, and the recycling space can’t generate that.
When they’re getting this pure polysilicon to manufacture solar wafers, there’s other types of agents and reactors and compositions baked into this, if you will. Now it’s not pure silicon. So when the recycling industry recovers it, that silicon could be used in a lot of other applications that don’t require 6N purity, but not solar manufacturing. So one of the biggest drivers of what makes the solar panel work all of a sudden still can’t go back into it.
And then there’s an economic side to it as well. Raw polysilicon is not the most expensive raw material. So the cost of — our industry, we partnered with some very brilliant researchers that have been working on this for years, and they could get it to that 6N purity, but the economics aren’t even close.
Mitch Ratcliffe (21:09)
Yeah, right. At the cost that it’s going to take, you wouldn’t be profitable. Yeah, there’s a lot to talk about here. Let’s take a quick commercial break, folks. We’ll be right back to continue the conversation with Brett Henderson of SolarPanelRecycling.com.
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. Let’s return to my conversation with Brett Henderson. He’s the co-founder and CEO of SPR, which you can find at solarpanelrecycling.com. They’re a North Carolina-based recycling company that’s partnered with the Solar Energy Industries Association to launch the nation’s first residential solar panel drop-off recycling program. Brett, you’ve reported that your recycling costs have fallen by 42% over the last 36 months. What are the factors that are driving that cost curve down?
Brett Henderson (21:57)
So there’s several things that really drove the 42% drop in costing, but the main one is the technological advances that we’ve had. We’re consistently investing in improving our recycling lines that are separating all of the commodities cleanly from the solar panel. So we used to make this joke starting in 2018, when we were under R&D stages and putting equipment in, that if you visited any of our facilities and came back six months later, you might see a wildly different line. And that was true for the better part of 2018 to 2023. Now, when you would come back, you’d see iterations of it, some add-ons, some movements, so you might not see a complete rip-up-the-script type of deal. But really, technological advances is what’s driving these costs down.
First and foremost, how many panels could get through a machine in a given hour is a large aspect of it. But more importantly is how cleanly are you recovering the silver, the aluminum, the items that have value, to really help cut into the cost of getting clean glass cullet out into the market, you know, the negative-valued items. So those technological advances have allowed us to recover higher returns on items and go direct to foundries, direct to consumers with our glass and aluminum and silver, and then also get cleaner commodity separation for even some of those negative-valued items to make sure that they’re consumed at a better rate. So technological advances is the largest one.
Second is just economies of scale, right? You know, when we first got into this space, we might have a month where we bring in 15,000, 25,000 panels, and then you have a month where we only bring in 5,000. Then you have a month where you have 50,000. Well, fast-forward to 2026, and we have all or some involvement with the largest utilities or energy companies in the United States, the largest asset owners. You have a little bit more consistency there in your volume coming through. So that allows us to go to market to these manufacturers that consume our generated commodities and (a) get better pricing because we’re giving them more consistent volume, or (b) even open up markets together, right? So, you