Solar recycler flags certification gap, reuse market concerns

Silver makes up roughly 0.5% of a solar cell’s mass, yet accounts for 47% of its recycling value, according to a May 2026 research paper on PV recycling in Science Bulletin – an imbalance that dictates much of how recyclers approach end-of-life panels.

SPR, whose North Carolina operation grew out of a two-decade-old electronics recycling company, has spent years developing its solar recycling process around those economic realities. With a key solar recycling certification deadline looming in January 2027, CEO Brett Henderson spoke with pv magazine about where SPR stands, how the company thinks about recovery rates, and what he is seeing in reuse markets.

pv magazine: Where does SPR’s North Carolina facility stand with regard to R2V3 Appendix G? Are you fully certified, mid-audit, or working toward a target date ahead of the January 2027 deadline?

Brett Henderson: SPR was formed out of a parent company that is an R2V3 and e-steward certified electronics recycler in business for about two decades … My concerns about the R2v3 in the solar industry is solar modules are basically a singular product line in terms of needed recycling technology where electronics have thousands of compositions and types, where the R2v3 allowance of a certified company to outsource the recycling and processing of certain electronics makes sense…. In solar recycling, modules are a negative value to process because it’s mostly composed of glass so our concerns with the R2V3 on the solar side, even though we fully support it and have been abiding by it for about 16 years on the parent company side, is that the Appendix G still allows the solar recycling to be outsourced while someone still carries the certification … SPR adamantly believes the glass needs to be recovered cleanly, and recovered by the R2v3 certified company in-house as it’s 65-80% of the module by mass.

At the moment, we’re kind of to be determined on the R2V3 in our new SPR, North Carolina facility opening this year, as we recognize it and support it as a cornerstone of the electronics recycling industry

If SPR decides not to pursue Appendix G, what are the implications — for SPR and for the industry?

If a recycling facility is a standalone solar recycling company, not already certified to R2v3 for electronics recycling, and there’s no solar asset owners requiring it for an RFP or requiring it to be onboarded as a vendor, there isn’t really any pressure to a standalone solar recycling company to get the Appendix G, at least at this time. We are closely monitoring SERI’s strong work and leadership in a solar recycling certification and will determine when it is the correct fit for SPR to present this certification to our solar asset owners.

In our North Carolina facility, both the parent company’s e-waste processing and SPR’s solar processing share a facility, SPR owning space until SPR completes our move into our own, state-of-the art solar recycling facility in Q4. That would be done before the R2v3 appendix deadline, as the R2v3 certifies companies to facility addresses there won’t be any pressure to move into this certification ahead of it being the correct fit for SPR’s solar asset owners —

Do you anticipate any impact on recycling volume if a meaningful share of the industry misses this deadline?

None of the major US EPCs, O&Ms, energy companies, or utilities are requiring this standard at the moment for RFP’s or onboarding, so if somebody does not hold this standard at the moment, it’s not going to affect throughput opportunities for recycling in the US market. Again, we fully support SERI and the R2v3 as a cornerstone of the electronics recycling industry, but at the moment in solar, the major asset owners conduct their own intense, thorough on-site audits of SPR’s recycling facilities at onboarding and approval, and certifications have not been part of those discussions, at least not yet

In a recent IEA-PVPS Task 12 report on recovery rates and process, the figures cited for SPR are 99% copper recovery and up to 98% silicon recovery. Are these numbers from independent third-party testing, or self-reported?

It’s a little bit of a hybrid. So IEA did not require us to send samples off to them or to a coordinated third party lab for them to confirm. But when they were doing their research, their questionnaires, their interviews, and understanding our processes, they highly recommended and wanted to see some third-party lab results. … So yes, SPR does have 3rd party lab testing on a myriad of outputs, glass, silicon, silver, copper, and aluminum as it’s a common requirement to earn supplier agreements from the consumers of our output.

How does SPR mechanically separate silicon, glass, and other materials during processing?

What gets conflated a lot on the mechanical side is taking full solar panels, batch feeding them through a shredder as a whole, and then trying to find ways to separate the different type of commodities within that. That type of mechanical processing tends to lead to contaminated products, more specifically contaminated glass. SPR uses mechanical, air, density, and electro-static separation at each stage, systematically separating each commodity, one-by-one, without contaminating one commodity with another; glass is only glass, aluminum is only aluminum, etc. There is not a mechanical shredder mixing all components together in our facilities, making some output unable to be consumed therefore unrecyclable.

Glass separation is key in the solar recycling industry as it’s much of a module by mass, without cleanly separating it, then glass cannot be consumed and recycling rates are insignificant. This is where we’ve already had $12 million of investment this year alone on some new glass technology, just to move our already clean glass cullet into an even more marketable product to consumers

Is SPR profitable on recycling alone, or are other revenue lines important?

SPR is profitable on recycling alone, but we consider that the sum of recycling fees from asset owners and recovered, positive valued commodities less processing costs and negative valued commodities recovered from the solar module. We also have revenue from decommissioning, on-site work, and project management. The recycling fee to asset owners has come down tremendously since we started in 2018, almost 42% at this point, and that’s mainly because we keep investing in two things, upgraded technology to get the cleanest separation and strategically placed recycling facilities closer to our client’s largest solar sites driving down our client’s largest cost, transportation.

What’s the biggest cost driver, and which costs do you expect to fall fastest as volume scales toward the end of the decade?

The largest cost driver in the US solar recycling market is going to be transportation. It’s quite important that we continuously build out our owned and operated distributed network of recycling facilities to lower our client’s cost from solar site to recycling plant. The biggest opportunities for costing to come down even further, outside of shorter transportation runs, is going to be more clean glass hitting the market in the United States, and it being able to be consumed even more regionally throughout the US … Volume is king in the glass consumption world

You mentioned solar reuse as a competing force in the industry. What’s happening there?

What’s going on at the moment globally is there’s quite a bit of greenwashing happening on this reuse side. … What’s happening globally, is aluminum is trading high enough now that some are willing to take panels for free from asset owners, say they’re going to be reused in volume elsewhere, and most of those panels are starting to get shipped overseas, whether that’s Southeast Asia or the west coast of Africa to be simply stripped of aluminum and the rest of the panel being dumped. We probably get pinged maybe 10 to 15 times a week as one of the globally known solar recycling brands from companies that say that they want to buy reused solar panels, but do not care about condition, testing, make, or model. Here’s the issue with that. … You can load about 500 to 550 of these modules for reuse on a container as proper packaging does not matter in this case use. A company could absorb the shipping costs to receive the panels overseas, … and have low to no labor costs to strip the aluminum to sell, and dump the rest, … and that’s all happening under the guise of “hey these panels are going to be reused elsewhere.”

The reuse market, at the moment, is nowhere near any level of scalability or demand for hundreds of thousands, or think millions during repowers, of used, dated panels. DIY applications, off grid applications, yes there is some market for and some companies reselling panels properly, but the engineering and construction, permitting, economics of decommissioning, properly testing a panel, safely repacking, and transport costs to a site to be commissioned, simply does not allow this reuse market to exist in high volume. Just one of the many reasons for that is there’s major regulations and hurdles about connecting used panels back to the grid, both domestically and abroad. … In the US specifically, the UL rating is no longer valid once that panel becomes used, and we believe rightfully so, stopping demand for used panels in its tracks for large scale projects being connected to the grid. High voltage leaking, microcracks, and other safety concerns to re-commissioning used panels are real.