SolarCycle ensures the eco-friendliness of their solar panel recycling process through several key methods and proprietary technologies focused on maximizing material recovery while minimizing environmental impact:
- Comprehensive Disassembly: The recycling process begins with the careful removal of the aluminum frame and the junction box from the crystalline silicon solar panels. This step isolates reusable components early.
- Proprietary Automated Processes: SolarCycle uses an automated, proprietary technology to cleanly separate the glass from the solar laminate, which contains solar cells, encapsulant layers, and backing materials. The remaining laminate is then shredded to facilitate further material separation.
- Multi-step Material Separation: After shredding, a multi-stage proprietary process separates plastics and recovers valuable metals such as silver, silicon, and copper. This high recovery rate ensures that up to 95% of a retired panel’s material value is extracted and returned to supply chains, promoting circular economy principles and reducing waste.
- Environmental Efficiency and Economic Viability: SolarCycle emphasizes carrying out these steps in an environmentally friendly and economically efficient way, ensuring that the recycling process does not cause additional significant environmental harm while maintaining commercial feasibility.
- Collaboration and Innovation Focus: SolarCycle collaborates with industry leaders and research institutions like the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to continually optimize their recovery processes, aiming to improve material extraction and reduce the residual waste from recycling.
- Closed-Loop Circular Economy Commitment: By returning high-purity recovered materials back into domestic solar manufacturing supply chains, SolarCycle supports the growth of sustainable renewable energy production, reducing reliance on virgin raw materials and minimizing landfill use.
Overall, SolarCycle’s eco-friendly approach combines advanced proprietary technology, high material recovery rates, and industry collaboration to ensure a sustainable, circular lifecycle for solar panels at their end of life. This minimizes environmental impact while supporting renewable energy growth.
Original article by NenPower, If reposted, please credit the source: https://nenpower.com/blog/how-does-solarcycle-ensure-the-eco-friendliness-of-their-recycling-process/
