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“Great” brand Disruptor London harnesses the chemical engineering know-how of co-founder Sira Dheshan Naidu to create waterless, multi-purpose bars for cleansing, shampooing, conditioning, and shaving. They’re ideal for busy mums, time-strapped gym-goers, and everyone in between, but the best part? It’s all rooted in veganism, transparency, and reducing consumption.
A beauty brand built on personal passions and sustainable values
Unlike many businesses that start with an idea for a product or solution, Disruptor London—the highest rated beauty brand in Good On You’s directory—grew from co-founders Sira Dheshan Naidu and Dr Juan Jose Jimenez Anca’s core values. “We’ve always known who we are—individually and as partners—so it felt natural to infuse these values into the foundation of our brand,” Naidu says. “We’re both really involved in Greenpeace and environmental activism. He [Anca] is a Quaker as well.” Together, they set out five principles (Naidu calls it a consideration framework) that guide everything Disruptor London does: Ingredient transparency, responsible consumption, waterless formulas, just-in-time manufacturing, and plastic-free packaging. These factors closely align with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 12, which is all about ensuring responsible production and reducing consumption.
The consideration framework, like the brand’s name itself, reads like an opposition to everything mainstream beauty represents—the industry is shrouded in mystery, littered with complex ingredient names, and crowded with so-called targeted products, from upper-arm creams to under-eye serums. And in this era, the co-founders want you to know that you really can do more with less—a single bar, in fact. Guided by circular design principles, Disruptor London’s sole product unites the functions of shampoo, conditioner, cleanser, and shave product in a single, sustainable solution.
“We need products that work hard for us in a green way, and it can only do that if it’s multi-functional,” says Naidu. Creating the bar required “forgetting everything we know about beauty,” and reimagining how products are used. “If I’m washing my hair and my face is getting wet, then why can’t we develop a product with a formula that’s going to be compatible with my skin, my hair and my scalp?”
The pair registered the business “after a few glasses of wine” on their sofa during COVID. “We’re partners in both life and business,” smiles Naidu, sharing how they decided to combine his beauty industry knowledge and formulation expertise with Anca’s skills in software engineering to become, perhaps, the ultimate power couple of the sustainable beauty movement. “I vividly remember when we decided to put things on paper—me the old-fashioned way with a notebook, and Juan sitting down with his laptop, but that’s just how we are,” Naidu says of how they complement each other.
Disruptor London’s co-founders, Dr Juan Jose Jimenez Anca and Sira Dheshan Naidu.
Why ingredient formulations are key to reducing beauty’s overconsumption problem
An insider with over 20 years’ experience working for major beauty brands, including Estée Lauder Companies, LVMH, and contract manufacturer MANA Products, Naidu knew exactly where to start in creating an alternative. “I’d always read INCI [cosmetic ingredient] lists on products, I know what goes into these things, and I have the understanding to develop them on my own,” he says.
Unsurprisingly, Naidu has selected the very best for Disruptor London’s shampoo bars, even upskilling with a course in organic skincare and haircare to ensure greater transparency in ingredient sourcing, and sometimes changing formulas completely if they’re unable to source raw materials of the highest standard and with ethical credentials.
We need products that work hard for us in a green way, and it can only do that if it’s multi-functional.
Sira Dheshan Naidu – co-founder, Disruptor London
Ingredients also play a big role in reducing consumption. Formulas based predominantly on water are cheap to make and therefore popular amongst brands, but they don’t last nearly as long as solid products that are packed with concentrated ingredients instead.
Long-lasting products present a business challenge because repeat customers don’t need to come back as frequently—the brand’s 100-gram bar, for instance, is designed to last around 80 washes. Naidu isn’t worried, though, noting that building the business slowly and making a small difference to the lives of consumers is exactly what he and Anca signed up for.
In fact, the latter is what brings Naidu the most joy: “The fact that we can put the power into your hands as a consumer, just through a product that you get up in the morning and use, take to the shower, to the gym, or on holiday, and know that you can make a difference—that makes us happy.
A final word, then, on how the rest of the beauty industry might take a leaf out of Disruptor London’s book? “It’s time for the beauty industry to hold up a mirror and confront a hard truth: Are we truly living up to the values we claim to represent? Or is it just PR? If sustainability isn’t a real priority, that’s a choice—but let’s not hide behind buzzwords like ‘clean beauty’ or the greenwashing that comes with them. Disruptor London isn’t here to shame or scare. Our focus is on creating high-performance products and giving consumers responsible, informed choices.”
Watch Disruptor London’s video to learn more about the brand’s history.
Discover Disruptor London’s multi-use shampoo bars and see its rating in our directory.
The post Our Highest-Rated Sustainable Beauty Brand Sells Only One Product appeared first on Good On You.
Our Highest-Rated Sustainable Beauty Brand Sells Only One Product
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 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 know, Mitch, if you wanted to use recycled glass cullet in something that you’re manufacturing, you’re probably not going to really take a serious look at that and start adjusting your manufacturing line until companies like SPR could say, I could provide you 160 tons every other week of it, right? So some of those economies of scale is really what helps bring down the pricing as well.
Mitch Ratcliffe (24:25)
Well, and that volume has allowed you to offer the residential panel recycling service, which of course then gives you another source of supply. But tell us about that program, and where can people drop stuff off?
Brett Henderson (24:36)
Yeah, absolutely. So, again, a lot of the recycling industry, really in any recycling medium, but even more so solar, is really driven around high volume, large scale. So all of the focus and the R&D and the education outreach is really toward corporations, private equity, anyone that owns these assets, utilities, energy companies. So the residential sector was kind of left behind as this industry that’s in its infancy is growing.
So SEIA, which is the largest trade association for solar in the United States, came to us two years ago and said, we’re receiving maybe 15, 20, 25 calls sometimes a week from a homeowner saying, we have one panel, we have two panels, we really like recycling, we don’t want to throw it in the landfill. So they recognized our early-mover advantage as one of the thought leaders in this industry, as well as the fact that our parent company already has municipality convenience center logistics and trucks staged throughout the country for the electronics recycling side. So they came to us and said a natural fit would be for us to partner together and kind of do this first pilot to understand how many residential panels are actually in need of being recycled. Are they willing to load that one panel in the back of their car to bring it to a convenience center?
So we partnered with Mecklenburg County, which is the county that represents Charlotte, North Carolina, for a few reasons. One, they have five collection sites that we already service. We already have trucks and infrastructure there, so it could keep costs low for the pilot. Secondly, our flagship recycling facility is 45 minutes up the road from it. And third, North Carolina is fourth in installations of solar in the entire nation. So it felt like a natural fit.
So we ran this six-month pilot program, and we found out a few pieces of key information. There is a willingness to recycle, but not a whole lot of volume yet. We received about 19 panels. And if you think about it — we talked about repowers earlier — a utility that’s trying to generate as much energy as possible for the grid, it makes sense to pull out a panel early, because you’re swapping out a 200-watt for an 800-watt, for a times-four multiplier. But when your house system is designed, it’s kind of designed to run the power that’s needed for the house. So a homeowner’s mindset is quite the opposite: I want these to last even past the 25 years. If I’m lucky, they last 50 years. So really, what you’re seeing in the residential space now would have to be a failed panel, or something quite literally dropping from the sky to crack it, or a hail event. That’s really what’s hitting the stream. So there’s not a whole lot of volume yet, but there is a willingness from those that invested in solar on the rooftop to want to actually recycle it.
Mitch Ratcliffe (27:19)
You make this point about the static needs of a home — I know I need this many kilowatt-hours to power the house overall. That suggests that there might be a reselling opportunity in taking those repowered panels you were talking about and making them available to residential buyers who do look for the 25 years that the utility is not interested in because they’re interested in maximum output. Is that a potential new direction for us to think about, repurposing some retired utility-scale solar panels?
Brett Henderson (27:52)
Yes. So we talk quite a bit on this. Finley Collins, who I mentioned earlier, our circularity research analyst, wrote a wonderful white paper on the challenges of reuse and repurpose. You know, any of the listeners are welcome to reach out on our website and request it. But there is an opportunity to reuse solar panels. Right now, in the market, though, it’s a little bit of greenwashing in the sense of really what that market could consume, and I’ll tell you why.
A solar panel isn’t plug-and-play. They’re not homogenous in their size, their width, their depth, their wattage, what inverter box, what string inverters it needs, the racking. So what happens is, when we have a utility take out 100,000 panels that still have life left on them, there could be an opportunity when you’re talking five panels, 10 panels, maybe for the DIYer to take that one panel and rig it on their RV. But this kind of notion that it’s going to put really any type of dent or percentage in panels from the recycling stream, to reuse, is quite flawed for that reason, right? And so utility-scale panels are typically heavier and larger, so the odds of it going on a rooftop application for a home is probably little to none. But that home might not have been developed yet, their system, and then they could consider something like that.
But, you know, when we’re talking about repowers — we’re under a repower right now that’s a million panels plus coming out, over the course of a few years as they’re doing it in stages — we get asked that all the time. Can’t you take these 1.2 million panels and put them overseas in an area that can’t afford it? And the challenge with that is, it has to be an engineered setup. You have to get the right racking, and then there’s a lot of interconnection rules about putting a used panel onto the grid. In the U.S., for example, the UL rating, once that panel is used and off of its initial application, the UL rating is no longer valid. So that’s just one of many problems of taking used panels and getting permitted to put a used panel back on the grid by the millions, by the hundreds of thousands — not for the DIYer that might want to put it on his or her RV.
Mitch Ratcliffe (30:14)
So 31 states have some form of decommissioning policy today. From a business design standpoint, which policies do you see actually creating functioning markets? Is it the landfill bans? The bonding requirements? Is it extended producer responsibility? And are there policies that just create paperwork?
Brett Henderson (30:33)
Yeah. So landfill bans is where we stand on this topic. We’re asked it quite often. I’ve spoken on the legislative floor in North Carolina for their economic review commission a few years back. Another partner of ours, Steven Turk, actually spoke up on Capitol Hill on this topic a little bit. But we see a landfill ban really being the one that would create the most action.
EPR is a very challenging thing to do in this space. You know, these panels might be installed for five years, 10 years, with the goal of them being 25 years, right? So how do we set up this EPR system when there could be a 25-year lifecycle for it? That creates some challenges. But even more so, we talked earlier about the leverage of this whole thing. There’s probably not going to be a tremendous amount of states willing to say to the manufacturer — which, by the way, most manufacturers are overseas still — that you’re not going to supply power to our state, even though the whole country is in need of as much power as possible, because you’re not helping fund recycling.
The state of Washington put in an EPR program for solar, and they had to extend the timeline for manufacturers to apply to it, because only one manufacturer actually went through the paperwork and applied to be compliant in it by its first deadline. So I think that’s just one example of why EPR might be a challenge.
So really, landfill bans is the largest thing that would drive it, as well as decommissioning, bonding, and insurance requirements. When we first got into the space, we would be presenting at a trade show, and someone would come up and say, hey, we’re trying to get this project permitted, and our locality needs to understand what the cost would be to return the land back to use. And they were tagging these as a positive: we’re going to take this equipment out, whether it’s five years, 10 years, 40 years down the road, and all the infrastructure is going to net positive value back, so we don’t need bonding, we don’t need insurance. And the education has kind of shifted that mentality now, where there are very few localities that aren’t onto that. So I think the landfill ban and the bonding and insurance requirements is really what would drive panels from going from landfill to recycling stream.
Mitch Ratcliffe (32:55)
Now, your bottom line is exposed to commodity price swings, like for aluminum and silver that we’ve been talking about. Can a recycler actually build a business model that survives a co