WRS plans first US solar panel critical materials recovery plant in Texas

We Recycle Solar has announced plans to construct the United States’ first end-to-end critical materials recovery facility for retired solar panels. The commercial-scale plant, located on a 10-acre campus outside Dallas, Texas, is scheduled to launch in the third quarter of 2027. The Arizona-based company stated that the facility will recover up to 96 percent of the silver, copper, silicon, aluminum, and glass contained in end-of-life solar panels. This process will produce clean, market-ready critical materials for direct resale through a fully domestic operation, with no offshore processing involved.

The new plant represents the first site in a planned network of high-efficiency critical material recovery facilities. We Recycle Solar intends to invest an estimated 100 million dollars over the next four years to develop four additional locations across the United States. This distributed network of domestic processing centers is designed to reduce logistics costs and better serve commercial and utility-scale asset owners nationwide. The company noted that conventional recycling methods often send semi-processed solar panel materials offshore for further recovery, whereas its new facility will process and recover valuable panel materials entirely within the US at a scale never before achieved domestically.

The plant will utilise a proprietary high-efficiency end-to-end critical mineral extraction process to achieve a throughput of one panel per minute. This approach bypasses the need for downstream smelting at overseas facilities. The launch of these next-generation capabilities marks a significant step towards strengthening domestic critical material supply chains essential to major US industrial sectors. Silver, which is critical to solar energy, artificial intelligence infrastructure, defence systems, electronics, and the power grid, is entering its sixth consecutive year of structural global deficits as industrial demand continues to outpace global supply, according to data from the Silver Institute and Metals Focus.

New export-licensing requirements introduced in January by China, which controls an estimated 60 to 70 percent of the global refined silver supply, have added further uncertainty to global silver markets. These developments have heightened concerns about critical material supply chain resilience and security. In the US, where solar is now the fastest-growing electricity source, retired solar panels represent a significant untapped source of critical materials. By 2050, the US is projected to hold the world’s largest stockpile of end-of-life solar panels behind China, worth more than 80 billion dollars in recyclable materials. Currently, an estimated 90 percent of America’s old solar panels go to landfill or are shipped to offshore processing centers, predominantly in Asia, where a significant share of the critical materials they contain are recovered and removed from the American supply chain entirely.

Adam Saghei, chief executive officer of We Recycle Solar, stated that solar panels contain the exact critical materials the US supply chain needs. He added that the company’s advanced process achieves true, comprehensive material recovery entirely on US soil, retaining these critical materials and the value currently being lost to Asian processing within the domestic supply chain. The company said the new facilities will build on its existing model of onsite decommissioning, recycling, and resale, expanding recovery capabilities to include silicon, silver, copper, aluminum, and glass at commercial scale, all processed domestically and in compliance with applicable permitting requirements.