The Nevada company’s thermal process decomposes plastic components in solar panels and recovers 100% of useful materials.
Comstock Metals, a closed-loop solar recycling company, is embarking on its “urban mining journey.”
“Instead of ripping silver out of the ground and processing it, we’re extracting it from solar panels to be reused in the supply chain,” Paul Harshbarger, a key accounts executive at Nevada-based Comstock Metals told pv magazine USA.
The company’s technique recovers 100% of useful materials from end-of-life panels using a proprietary thermal process that separates panel components and spits out raw aluminum, glass and metal.
Harshbarger explained solar panels are essentially “sandwiches” of minerals, metals and plastics. While many recyclers mechanically disassemble panels, Comstock’s approach offers more finesse.
“When you rip a Band-Aid off your arm, it takes a bit of hair with it and leaves behind some of the adhesive materials,” he explained. “Splicing plastic off a solar panel is the same. It takes some of the trace metals and leaves behind some of the plastic, which makes the components difficult to process or exchange.”
By heating shredded panels to high temperatures, Comstock decomposes the plastic layers and frees up all materials (including aluminum, glass, silver and silicon) for reuse.
“There’s no waste product,” Harshbarger added. Everything is recaptured. And there’s no market for downstream solar panel plastic.
“Otherwise, the plastic either has to go to a landfill, or you have to pay someone to ‘make the problem go away.’ That doesn’t sit right with us, so we eliminate the plastic entirely,” Harshbarger said.
The company’s approach is also scalable. Harshbarger noted most panel recyclers remove aluminum frames by hand or with specialized machines, which is time-consuming and limits throughput.
“If it looks like a DNA strand, your machine can’t handle it,” he said of conventional recycling lines. “We send panels in by the handful, and the shredder eats them up.”
Comstock currently processes around 200,000 individual panels every year. But, pending approvals, a larger facility is expected to come online within the next year that could handle up to four million panels annually.
Policy changes could shape the future of panel recycling. Washington State is preparing to roll out its solar recycling mandate come July. California and Hawaii have already implemented stricter rules for panel disposal and Harshbarger noted Nevada has signaled it will follow suit with neighboring states. He now sees an opportunity at the federal level.
“If I were the federal EPA, I would designate all end-of-life panels as universal waste [like California and Hawaii],” said Harshbarger, joking that he’d also mandate they all should be recycled with Comstock Metals, though he “knows that he can’t do that.” The universal waste designation means that no panels would end up in landfills, as they must be recycled.
“Proper recycling doesn’t send panels overseas or only recycle some of the panels you receive,” he added. “Unless you can take every material and put it back into the critical materials market, it doesn’t count as recycling.”
“The people who win in this game are the ones who can certify that they handle panels properly,” he said. “Recyclers win, developers win because their panels are handled responsibly, and manufacturers win because there’s no legacy liability down the line.”
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