Recycled Solar Panels Could Supply 21% of Silver Demand by 2035

The solar industry is set to receive a significant boost from recycling, with research suggesting that panels installed in 2020 could supply up to 21% of the silver needed for new panel production by 2035. This projection comes from Rystad Energy, which estimates that recyclable materials from solar panels are worth around $2 billion today and could reach roughly $80 billion by 2050.

The growth in demand for critical minerals such as copper, rare earths, silver, and other materials is driving the development of recycling technologies. Battery recycling at Redwood Materials has already reached significant scales, with over 20 GWh of lithium-ion batteries processed each year and 60,000+ metric tons of critical materials produced annually.

Technical advances are making solar-panel recycling more economic, allowing recyclers to extract silver and silicon more efficiently. A laser-assisted process developed by researchers at the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) recovered silicon at purity up to 99.998% and silver at 99.7%, with yields of about 97%. Another method relying on flotation techniques from the mining industry can also be scaled commercially.