As hurricanes, drought and the other symptoms of our climate crisis become increasingly present in our daily lives, many of us are looking for ways to learn more about our changing world. The following beautiful and entertaining works of graphic nonfiction also grapple with difficult issues regarding climate change, fossil fuel extraction and the loss of once-natural spaces, for readers of all ages.
Climate Changed: A Personal Journey through the Science, Philippe Squarzoni (2014)
Abrams Books
Imagine a documentary, but portrayed in squares of cartoons and lines of text, or a textbook on climate science, but much more engaging and with much better pictures. Climate Changed by French cartoonist Philippe Squarzoni takes readers through his own quest to learn about the science of climate change, after he realized that he knew next to nothing about it. Deftly combining research, personal reflection, interviews with climate experts and stunning black-and-white visuals, Squarzoni teaches readers about the basics of climate change, breaking down difficult concepts like atmospheric science, the benefits and drawbacks of renewable energy options, the IPCC, and how we got here — that is, at the center of a climate crisis — in the first place. At nearly 500 pages, it’s no light read, but the subject matter isn’t light either, and nearly a decade after its publication, the book is still highly relevant and beneficial to all readers hoping to understand more about our changing planet.
Paying the Land, Joe Sacco (2020)
Macmillan Publishers
Joe Sacco’s 2020 blend of comic and journalism, Paying the Land, centers around the Dene people — an indigenous group in the Northwest Territories of Canada in the Mackenzie River Valley — and the mining industry that began to encroach in the late 1800s. Mining for oil, gas and diamonds brought jobs to these territories, and with it, waste, scarred landscapes, pipelines and development, as well as rising rates of alcohol abuse and other social problems. Sacco explores the benefits and the steep costs of mining on the Dene people, to whom the land was essential to their livelihoods and ways of being — and which they believe cannot be owned in the first place. He digs into the history of the region, including the residential school system that isolated indigenous children from their families and culture, and how the Dene came to rely on wage labor.
The book’s name is derived from the long Dene tradition of repaying the land when something is taken from it, thereby allowing the earth to continue sustaining itself. This idea is commented on throughout the book — both visually and in words — on the fossil fuel industry’s antithetical treatment of the land, taking from it by drilling for oil and fracked gas, and leaving only toxins behind.
The book asks us to see how the fossil fuels that we use are linked to the displacement of indigenous people and the desecration of our environment, and the deep complexity of these issues.
Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, Kate Beaton (2022)
Drawn & Quarterly
In 2008, hundreds of migrating ducks died after landing in the oil sludge of Alberta’s oil sands. This graphic memoir chronicles Kate Beaton’s time as a laborer in those sands, trying to pay off her student loans during the lucrative Alberta oil rush. Against a backdrop of Canada’s stunning landscapes, Beaton’s illustrations of industrial development and razed earth show the visible and devastating impact of the oil sands on the environment. During her two years on the job, Beaton faces harassment, misogyny and threat of violence from the men she works alongside. The book exposes the trauma and hardship inherent to this kind of work that isn’t often discussed. She considers the land that was taken from First Nations people for this industry, and how they’ve become economically wrapped up in the oil sands, but have also suffered from higher rates of cancer. Ultimately, the book serves as a critique of the way we cheaply, irresponsibly and violently source our energy.
Oak Flat: A Fight for Sacred Land in the American West, Lauren Redniss (2020)
Penguin Random House
In Oak Flat, artist and writer Lauren Redniss follows the long battle of the Apache people to save their land from development. The title refers to Oak Flat itself, a mesa in southeastern Arizona near the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation. The site has historical and cultural significance to the Apache people as an ancient burial ground, and as the place where young Apache women hold their coming-of-age Sunrise Ceremony. Ten years after copper reserves were discovered in the area in 1995, a law passed that transferred ownership of the land to Resolution Copper, which is still planning mining development that would alter this landscape forever. While the company has promised jobs — an attractive prospect in an area that has faced much economic hardship — skepticism and fear of another boom-and-bust cycle pervades in the divided community. The book is structured around interviews with native people who live near Oak Flat — two families in particular, including one of an Apache teenage activist, and a mining family. Through it all, Redniss’ vibrant and colorful pencil sketches of the landscape and its people depict the beauty of Oak Flat.
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Satellite dishes outlast the subscriptions that put them there. Drive through almost any American neighborhood and you will see them still bolted to fascia boards and chimney straps, aimed at satellites their owners stopped paying for years ago.
The subscriber base that installed those dishes is collapsing. Pew Research Center found in July 2025 that 36% of U.S. adults still subscribe to cable or satellite TV, while 83% watch streaming services. DIRECTV and DISH told investors in 2024 that they had collectively lost 63% of their satellite subscribers since 2016.
Every one of those canceled accounts left hardware behind, and removal and recycling still fall to the subscriber, who gets little support from the provider. For lack of clear information, a lot of that hardware ends up in a landfill.
Can You Recycle Your Satellite TV Dish?
Depending on who you ask, the proper method of disposal for a satellite TV dish can be as clear as, well, a fuzzy TV signal. So let’s tune in to what a dish system is made of, because the answer determines where each piece goes.
A residential satellite system is not one product. It is four material streams bolted together:
- The reflector. The curved part everyone pictures. On modern 18- to 20-inch DIRECTV and DISH installations it is thin, powder-coated steel. Older and larger dishes are often aluminum. Either way, it is scrap metal and easily recyclable in most communities.
- The LNB. The low-noise block downconverter on the end of the arm. It holds a circuit board and is the piece that makes the system electronic waste.
- The mount and hardware. Usually galvanized steel, and usually the heaviest recyclable component in the assembly.
- Coaxial cable. Copper conductor inside plastic jacketing, which scrap yards buy separately as insulated wire.
The Institute for Environmental Research and Education recommends separating those parts of the dish before you haul anything anywhere: detach the LNB, coil the coax, and sort aluminum from steel. That takes about 20 minutes with a screwdriver and a wrench, and it is the difference between a recycler accepting your load and turning it away.
The receiver, DVR, and remotes are a separate question, and an important one. Those are usually leased. If you cancel service and keep them, you will be billed for them.
Once It’s Installed, It’s Yours
This is the part that surprises people. The dish becomes the property of the homeowner at installation. Neither provider sends a technician to take it down when you cancel, and neither is obligated to. DIRECTV’s own support forums state the position plainly: the receivers go back, the dish stays, and what happens to it next is up to you.
Renters have a related wrinkle. The FCC’s Over-the-Air Reception Devices rule protects your right to install a dish under one meter in areas under your exclusive control, such as a balcony or patio, and it limits what landlords and HOAs can prohibit. It does not cover shared roofs or exterior walls, and it does not remove your responsibility to take the dish down and repair the mounting holes when you move out.
Read your lease before you install anything.
The Rules Changed in Some States, But Not Federally
U.S. federal guidelines still do not regulate circuit boards as hazardous waste, and there is no national electronics recycling law. What exists instead is a patchwork of state and local policy.
Twenty-five states plus the District of Columbia have passed electronics recycling legislation, most of it built on producer responsibility principles, and roughly two dozen states ban electronics from landfills outright. Whether your dish system is legally landfill-bound depends entirely on your ZIP code.
One change is worth flagging because it is new and relevant. Oregon’s modernized E-Cycles program took effect January 1, 2026, and the expanded list of covered devices now includes cable and satellite receivers, routers, modems, and game consoles. Oregon residents can drop those off free. The reflector itself is not a covered device, so it still goes to scrap metal, but the electronic half of the system finally has a no-cost home in one more state.
The stakes behind these rules keep climbing. The UN’s Global E-waste Monitor 2024 found the world generated a record 62 million metric tons of electronic waste in 2022 and formally collected and recycled just 22.3% of it. Generation is on track to hit 82 million metric tons by 2030, growing about five times faster than documented recycling.
Don’t Count on the Scrap Value
Earlier versions of this article suggested that local scrap vendors might be willing to pull the system down for the value of the materials. That is worth a reality check in 2026.
Scrap yards pay by weight and by grade. A modern 18-inch dish is a few pounds of thin, coated steel, which grades low and weighs almost nothing. The coax and the mount are worth more than the reflector, and the whole assembly is still unlikely to buy you lunch. Older six- to 12-foot aluminum C-band dishes are a genuinely different story and can be worth hauling. For the small dishes on most roofs, treat scrap as a disposal route rather than a payday, and do not expect a yard to send a crew for it.
Tips To Get You Started
Here at Earth911, we want your satellite TV dish handled properly at the end of its life. That is not the case. Here is the sequence that actually works:
- Check your provider’s recycling page first and know what it covers. DIRECTV’s recycling page issues a prepaid shipping label and routes equipment to R2-certified recyclers. DISH points customers to Best Buy and a UPS mail-in program that offers free recycling if you pay the shipping costs. Both programs are built around receivers, remotes, and small equipment. Neither is designed to take the dish off your roof.
- Return leased equipment on time. Providers typically give you about three weeks from the disconnect date before non-return fees land on your final bill. Get a receipt at the drop-off point and keep it.
- Search for a satellite dish removal service, a handyman, or a local roofing company. Roofers are the right call if the mount is through the shingles, because someone has to seal the penetrations afterward. Removal is a roof job, not a recycling job, and the two rarely come bundled.
- Find a certified recycler for the electronics. Look for R2 or e-Stewards certification, which tells you the downstream processing is audited. Use the Earth911 recycling search to find electronics and scrap metal locations near you.
- Take the reflector and mount to a scrap metal yard. Separate steel from aluminum before you go.
- Consider reuse before recycling. A working dish and LNB have a second life in free-to-air reception, RV and off-grid setups, and amateur satellite work. Offer it to others locally before you scrap it. There are also plenty of repurposing projects if you would rather keep it out of the waste stream entirely.
- Watch out for lead-generation sites. Several “satellite dish removal” domains are referral networks that sell your contact information to whichever contractor is paying, not recyclers. Ask any service directly where the material goes and whether they are certified.
Earth911 Does Not Remove or Recycle Dishes
We regularly receive inquiries about whether Earth911 offers removal services. We do not. Earth911 does not offer satellite TV dish removal or recycling. If a satellite TV provider or one of its representatives tells you otherwise, that is not accurate information.
What Comes Next for Satellite TV
The retirement wave is not finished. DIRECTV shed roughly 288,000 subscribers in the third quarter of 2025 alone, according to reporting by TheStreet. EchoStar reported 6.63 million pay-TV subscribers at the end of the first quarter of 2026 after a net loss of 366,000 in three months, and its Dish DBS unit filed a prepackaged Chapter 11 restructuring on June 30, 2026. The company says Dish Network and Sling TV service continues without interruption.
For subscribers, the practical takeaway is unchanged: corporate restructuring does not come with a dish removal crew. If you are canceling, plan for the disposing of the hardware. Return what is leased, get the dish down safely, split the metal from the electronics, and route each stream to somewhere that will process it. That is a Saturday afternoon’s work that can keep your dish out of a landfill.
Related Reading
Editor’s note: This article was originally published on June 10, 2015. It was most recently updated in July 2026. Feature image courtesy of Alexis Lê-Quôc.
The post Need to Recycle Your Satellite TV Dish? Read This First appeared first on Earth911.
https://earth911.com/eco-tech/looking-to-recycle-your-satellite-tv-dish-read-this-first/
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.
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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 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 ind