How We Solved Renewables BIGGEST Problem

CORRECTION: the original version stated that silver “price has tripled in the past three years.”  It’s demand that tripled, not price.

As renewable energy installations multiply across the globe, the first generation of solar panels, wind turbine blades, and lithium batteries is reaching the end of its lifespan and coming offline. With a tidal wave of waste potentially slamming landfills worldwide — is it true that these technologies are un-recyclable? Or that these green initiatives are maybe worse for the environment? Or could emerging recycling and upcycling technologies redirect this flood of waste into a new generation of photovoltaics, wind turbines, and battery banks designed to be continuously recycled and regenerated? Just how close are we to “closing the loop”?

When we think of recycling, we think of sorting glass, paper, and plastics into separate bins. But what can be done with complex, mixed-materials technologies like solar panels and other renewable energy components?

Deconstructing the Solar Panel Sandwich

Most large solar farms today use silicon photovoltaic panels, made by printing silver circuits onto silicon wafers and adding copper connections. These cells are then sandwiched between glass panels with layers of sticky polymer that glue it all together like a grilled cheese.

But how do you un-make that sandwich to recycle the panel’s individual components, and how do you deal with the polymer? This is a problem of Meat Mountain proportions: Around 8 million metric tons of retired solar panels could pile up globally by 2030. By 2050, that number could hit 80 million.¹

For many, it’s not appetizing to recycle these panels for about $18 a pop when dumping them in landfill costs just $5.² But as solar farms expand, we may reach a tipping point where reclaiming materials is cheaper than mining new ones. By 2050, MIT projects recovered materials from retired panels could be worth $2 billion a year.¹ This number is driven in part by increasing demand for crucial components like silver, whose demand has tripled in the past three years as stockpiles have become depleted.³ Considering 60% of solar panel costs come from the price of silver, recycling may become a more attractive alternative. ²

Another driver is legislation: Washington state has banned solar panels from entering landfills and, like the European Union, has mandated that manufacturers mount take-back programs to ensure panels get recycled.⁴

Some companies are responding proactively to this push for sustainability, like Solarcycle in Texas, which has developed an innovative process to “unmake” the solar panel sandwich, recycling up to 90% of each unit. The company removes the junction box and aluminum frame, then uses heat to cleanly separate the glass from the polymer and solar cells. Solarcycle then grinds the cells down to recover valuable materials like silicon, silver, copper, aluminum, and tin. I’ve visited their facility in Texas and have a whole video on it if you’d like to see more.

Soon, glass collected at Solarcycles’s big new recycling plant in Georgia will be shipped off for use in new photovoltaic panels manufactured by Runergy in Alabama, Silfab Solar in South Carolina, and Heliene in both Minnesota and Ontario.⁵⁶⁷ More companies are joining the recycling movement, including SolarPanelRecycling.com, which now operates facilities in North Carolina and Georgia, with a third opening soon in Texas.⁸

As another example, the Italian start-up 9-Tech has just announced two innovations to reduce the emissions and environmental impact of current recycling methods: it’s using filters to capture the carbon monoxide, hydrofluoric acid, and other harmful pollutants released when burning polymer off fragments of busted-up solar panel. And instead of stripping silver from the silicon wafer with toxic reagents like hydrofluoric acid, nitric acid, or sodium hydroxide, 9-Tech is dislodging the silver in ultrasonic baths filled with far gentler organic acids. The company claims to recover 90% of the silver, 95% of the silicon, and 99% or more of the copper, aluminum, and glass with high purity and will scale up from a pilot plant to a recycling facility in the next 18 months.⁹

Those are some fantastic steps forward on solar panel recycling, but what about making a more recyclable solar panel? Well, what if you could make a solar panel without the need for polymers that glue the panels and glass together? That would mean no more fumes or need to burn them off during recycling. This may soon become a reality thanks to researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (or NREL), who’ve pioneered the use of femtosecond lasers to form glass-to-glass welds, eliminating the need for polymer adhesives when manufacturing the solar panel sandwich.¹⁰¹¹

Femtosecond lasers emit super short pulses — like quadrillionths of a second — of infrared light to melt the glass together, creating a hermetic seal. These laser welds are placed so precisely and performed so quickly that they don’t heat up nearby materials, meaning that they can be used for all sorts of solar technologies including silicon, perovskites, and cadmium telluride—all technologies I’ve covered in recent videos.

Eliminating polymer adhesives from solar panels would not only make them easier and cleaner to recycle, but it could make them last longer. Polymer degradation is a major reason solar panels are retired after 25 years or so.¹⁰ The adhesive degrades in the sun, causing discoloration that reduces photon flux to the cells. And delamination of the polymer can let in water and oxygen, leading to corrosion. This technology isn’t on the market yet, but increased longevity and recyclability could deliver a one-two punch keeping solar panels on the farm longer and recycling them more readily when their time is up. In our solar panel sandwich structure, perhaps we’ll soon be able to say, “hold the cheese, please.”

Giving Wind Turbine Blades New Life

With new advances in solar panel manufacturing and recycling, we’re seeing these processes get more streamlined and better connected…moving us closer to a true “circular economy.” That’s the goal, too, for wind energy. While wind turbine blades turn endlessly in full circles, their recyclability has long remained … stuck. But there’s some interesting movement to fix that.

Today’s turbine fleets have average wingspans longer than a football field.¹² With these massive new sizes come with material challenges: to last 20-plus years, blades must be durable; and to bear their own weight through 100 million load cycles without bending out of shape, they’ve got to be lightweight yet stiff.¹³ That’s why modern turbines are mostly hollow, with outer shells made of glass or carbon fibers bound in thermoset resins like epoxy to add strength.

And there in the resin lies the problem: there’s no easy way to break these thermosets back down to recycle the fibers when the blade reaches the end of its life. The resin can be burned off, generating air pollutants, and it also leaves the fibers brittle and contaminated with char. The alternative, degrading the resin with harsh solvents, generates additional hazardous waste.¹³

As a result, retired blades end up in the landfill. By 2050, an estimated 43 million tons of wind turbine blade waste could accumulate in landfills across the globe¹⁴, which is a prospect that is anything but clean or sustainable.

In a bid to spur innovation, the U.S DOE awarded $3.6 million to companies inventing new, sustainable uses for blades as part of its Wind Turbine Materials Recycling Prize. Some of these companies are putting ground-up blades to use in construction: creating recyclable flooring, waterproof concrete treatments, and even fillers for large-scale 3D printing. Another company is extending blade life using electrical pulses to transform the glass fiber-resin composite into silicon carbide — a process that also generates clean hydrogen as a byproduct.¹⁵

But to make wind power truly sustainable, we’ll need to go beyond reusing old turbine blades; we’ve got to recycle them into new blades. So is recycling really that hopeless? Perhaps not anymore. Researchers over at NREL have engineered a resin that just might herald in the age of fully recyclable wind turbine blades.¹⁶

This polymer, called PECAN, or PolyEster Covalent Adaptable Network (an acronym that’s kind of nuts), is even greener than traditional resins because it’s made from biomass-derived materials. And unlike industry-standard resins, PECAN breaks down when the resin-fiber composite is soaked in simple methanol at 225°C for just six hours, leaving behind squeaky-clean, strong glass fibers ready for reuse. While the resin itself isn’t directly reusable, the degraded resin can be repurposed into rigid and flexible polyurethane plastics, giving it a valuable second life.

Using PECAN, the team built a 9-meter proof-of-concept recyclable wind-blade to demonstrate that this resin is plug and play with industry-standard, vacuum-assisted blade manufacturing techniques. They also subjected PECAN-reinforced fiberglass to a battery of tests, and found that PECAN’s strength and weather resistance matched, and in some cases exceeded, that of the industry-standard resin, RIMR-135.

This blows away the idea that something designed to be recyclable will have inherently worse material properties. That just isn’t so with PECAN, marking a major advancement toward a circular economy in wind turbine blade manufacturing. I don’t know why, but I can’t stop thinking about pie right now.

A Green Footprint for Energy Storage

Of course, it’s not just the sources of renewable energy that need to be recyclable; the way we store that energy needs a green footprint, too.

To address the gap between peak solar energy provision during the day and peak energy usage in the evenings, massive grid storage systems are starting to roll out worldwide. Take California, which began integrating large-scale batteries into its grid in 2019, growing its battery storage capacity from 770 million to 10 billion watts over the last five years.¹⁷

Globally, 97 gigawatt hours of energy storage were added in 2023, with 442 gigawatt hours projected by 2030.¹⁸ This growth has been largely driven by a remarkable 43% drop in energy storage prices in China between 2023 and 2024.¹⁸

But just like solar panels and wind turbine blades, all good batteries must come to an end. And these batteries aren’t just in energy grid storage systems, but in businesses, homes, cars and even electric bicycles. Just how recyclable is all this tech?

Very.

Battery materials like lithium, cobalt, copper, and nickel don’t deplete or degrade as batteries age. Instead, they can be recovered, refined, and reintegrated into new battery production. That’s especially good news because the extraction of minerals used in lithium batteries has been linked to human rights abuses and environmental degradation,¹⁹ but recycling lithium batteries reduces environmental impacts by 59% or more.²⁰

The EU passed legislation in 2022 setting minimum recycled content requirements for lithium ion batteries sold there.²¹ And, of course, the greenest way to produce new batteries from recycled materials is to do it locally, eliminating the economic and environmental costs of shipping batteries halfway across the world. Again, the goal is a circular supply chain, which is what US-based company Redwood Materials is aiming for.

Launched by Tesla co-founder J.B. Straubel, Redwood Materials in Nevada estimates it recycles 20 gigawatt-hours worth of decommissioned lithium cells each year, reclaiming enough materials to outfit 250,000 electric vehicles with fresh battery packs.²² The company uses a chemical recycling process to recover over 95% of battery materials, recycling them into fresh anode and cathode components.

As a wave of first-generation lithium batteries reaches the end of their lifespan, the company is expanding to meet recycling demands by opening new facilities in South Carolina and acquiring the German recycler Redux Recycling GmbH.²³²⁴

Redwood Materials has already inked deals to recycle electric vehicle batteries from Tesla, Ford, General Motors, BMW, Toyota, Nissan, and e-bike manufacturer Specialized. In a crucial step toward closing the loop on battery production, BMW and Toyota have also committed to purchasing new battery components directly from Redwood Materials.²³²⁵

Of course, recycling is only economically sustainable if it’s also profitable. Redwood Materials claims to already pull “well north” of $100 million in profits each year already.²² And with minimum recycled content legislation like that in the EU, profit is sure to rise for companies jumping on the battery recycling bandwagon.

How is Redwood Materials pulling this off? They are using proprietary hydrometallurgical techniques that leach specific metals from the waste batteries. While the specific plant design and process flow is not available to the public, they have based much of it on a study from Stanford University. ²⁶

To be clear, meeting the world’s demand for renewable energy production and storage will require significantly more raw materials and additional mining. The bar isn’t yet a perfectly closed production loop, but a reduced dependence on fossil fuels and meaningful strides toward sustainability. On top of this, we need to keep an eye on the next generation of photovoltaics, wind turbines, and battery systems designed for continuous recycling and regeneration. It’s why I cover the topics I do on the channel.

As this first generation of renewable energy components is decommissioned, we’re witnessing renewables grow through their awkward adolescence. Our job is to guide their maturation into better technologies we can’t yet fully envision. A cradle-to-grave perspective is a crucial part of that.