China’s focused efforts signal the country’s view that solar panel recycling is a strategic approach to building a pipeline of critical materials to drive economic development and prepare for the next phase of the energy transition.
By Pablo Ribeiro Dias, Chief Technology Officer, Solarcycle
Given China’s leading position in the solar industry, it might be surprising to learn that China is not the leader in solar recycling. In fact, the U.S. and Europe have far more mature markets and are home to the industry’s dominant players. But China is taking serious steps to position itself to rival the U.S. and EU by 2030, and we should all be paying attention.  
The country is following a familiar playbook: centralized policy, local experimentation and targeted capital. This recipe is exactly how China achieved its dominant position in solar manufacturing. China’s focused efforts signal the country’s view that solar panel recycling is not just about managing waste, it is a strategic approach to building a healthy pipeline of critical materials to drive economic development and prepare for the next phase of the energy transition. 
Recently, I had the privilege of being one of only a handful of foreigners invited to attend China’s annual ECOPV Alliance (China Green Supply Chain Alliance Photovoltaic Committee) meeting, where business leaders, researchers, industry alliances and government figures gathered to discuss the current and future state of end-of-life solar in China. During the event, ECOPV’s exclusive annual “China PV Recovery and Recycling White Paper” was released, outlining 2025 findings and the road ahead. The biggest takeaway was not that China already has solved end-of-life solar. It has not. The market today is still fragmented, uneven and in many ways chaotic. The real takeaway is that China appears to have recognized this disorder as a strategic problem and has started treating it accordingly. 
At the meeting, one phrase came up repeatedly: the “last mile” of solar. It is a useful one. China already has built an extraordinary degree of vertical integration across the solar value chain. It has scale in high-purity silicon, wafers, cells, modules and the broader manufacturing ecosystem around them. But once panels reach the end of their useful lives, the loop still is not fully closed. Recovering those materials and putting them back into the supply chain remains the unfinished part of the project, or the “last mile.” 
The timing matters. China now has more than 1 terawatt of installed solar capacity, but its installed base is younger than that of places like Western Europe and the U.S. That means China is not yet seeing its biggest end-of-life volumes. According to the white paper and the discussions around it, the real inflection point is expected around 2030. But what I learned is that China is not waiting for the wave of retired panels to arrive before building the systems to handle it. It is trying to build ahead of the wave.  
One key challenge China is trying to solve is volatility. Because deployment itself happened in surges, decommissioning also is expected to come in intermittent waves rather than in a smooth, predictable flow. If recycling capacity is built too slowly, those spikes will overwhelm the system. But there is another risk as well: If capacity is built too aggressively, too early, the recycling sector could end up repeating one of the defining features of Chinese manufacturing more broadly—overcapacity. That concern was present in the discussions. China wants to build this industry before the waste volumes peak, but it also is aware of the danger of copying the solar manufacturing story too literally: too many players, too much duplicated capacity and too much capital chasing volumes that have not yet fully arrived. That is one reason the policy design matters so much. 
What I saw was a familiar pattern, paralleling the story of solar manufacturing in China: central direction, local experimentation, targeted capital and a clear preference for formal industrial capacity over informal or opportunistic practices. But unlike a simple race to build more plants, the strategy also seems aimed at shaping what kind of industry emerges.  
“Two-new” policies kept showing up over and over. One is building a standardization system. The other is accelerating environmental equipment research, development and deployment. Those two priorities are revealing. The first suggests that China understands the market cannot mature if it remains technically fragmented, operationally inconsistent and difficult to regulate. Standards are often what separates an improvised market from an industry. The second suggests that China is not content with treating solar recycling as a low-tech waste-handling business. The ambition is to turn recycling into a technology industry. That idea drives the policy strategy.  
The central government is setting direction, but provinces are being allowed to test different policy tools. Some are experimenting with extended producer responsibility models. Others are trying landfill bans. Some are letting the free market do its thing. We are yet to see which model comes out ahead. At the same time, the state is putting real money behind the buildout. One of the most striking signals of China’s commitment to the circular economy came in last year: In August, the government designated 500 billion RMB ($70 billion) from special ultra-long-term government bonds to support the ‘two-new’ policy. These policies reaffirm that China is treating recycling as industrial infrastructure.  
That might be the clearest lesson for other markets. If solar recycling is treated mainly as a waste problem, it likely will remain fragmented, low-margin and reactive. If it is treated as industrial infrastructure, the conversation changes. Standards, targeted R&D, enforcement and capacity planning all matter. 
Another element is worth watching closely: enforcement. The government is cracking down on what it calls informal practices, including uncontrolled chemical leaching and thermal processing without emissions controls. That serves two purposes at once. First, it limits pollution. Second, it protects the companies investing in legitimate, compliant and technically sophisticated operations from being undercut by low-cost, dirty processing. That distinction matters because a market cannot mature if the most serious players are forced to compete against operators that ignore environmental controls, skip treatment systems and carry none of the overhead that responsible processing requires. I regularly see this issue in the U.S.: Companies taking advantage of the nascent industry, underdeveloped standards and limited monitoring to make a quick profit while damaging the environment and avoiding the hard work of responsible recycling. 
But the most telling sign of where China wants this industry to go is technical, not just regulatory. The goal is not to remain in what might be called legacy recycling: shredding panels, pulling out some bulk materials and treating the rest as a lower-value stream. The push is toward high-value recovery: separating components with greater purity, avoiding cross-contamination and recovering materials in forms that can reenter industrial supply chains at much higher value. That is a very different ambition. It is also why “recycling” might be the wrong word, or at least an incomplete one. For many people, recycling still brings to mind waste collection, compliance and low-margin material handling. But what China is trying to build looks closer to high-tech material recovery. The feedstock is already in circulation. The challenge is not finding the material. It is recovering it cleanly, efficiently and at scale. 
That is especially clear in the focus on EVA, or ethylene-vinyl acetate,  removal, one of the core technical bottlenecks in solar recycling. EVA is designed to survive decades in the field. That makes it an excellent material in a module and a very difficult one for recyclers. The government is directing research institutions and private companies toward solving that problem through multiple pathways, including high-precision mechanical approaches, targeted chemical solvents and controlled pyrolysis. Again, this is not a waste-management mindset. It is a technology-development mindset. 
And this is where the broader pattern becomes hard to ignore. We have seen China run this play before. It did not become dominant in solar manufacturing by accident. It aligned policy, capital, experimentation and industrial capacity around a long-term objective. What I saw in March had many of those same early signals, only now applied to end-of-life systems.  
China is not ahead in solar recycling today. The U.S. solar recycling market is emerging as one of the most mature globally outside Europe, driven in large part by the fact that large-scale solar deployment began earlier in the U.S. than in China. As a result, end-of-life solar panels started appearing sooner, prompting earlier development of recycling infrastructure, specialized state legislation in places like California and Washington and operational expertise at commercial scale.  
This head start should be treated as an advantage to build on, not as a reason for complacency. If the U.S. wants to remain ahead, it has to treat solar recycling as more than a niche environmental service. It should be viewed as a strategic industrial capability: One that requires serious standards, credible enforcement, continued technology development and companies willing to invest in real recovery systems rather than minimum-compliance waste handling. 
While China has a large number of recyclers, the market remains fragmented, whereas the U.S. has demonstrated the ability to process material at the scale needed to solve the coming wave of end-of-life solar material. This combination of early market maturity, advanced recycling technology and industry-leading material recovery capabilities from leading providers positions the U.S. as one of the largest long-term opportunities in the global solar circular economy. The U.S. does not need to prove that serious solar recycling can scale; it already has companies showing that it can. What it needs is a policy environment that rewards real recovery, pushes out free-riders and treats recycling as a strategic high-tech industry linked to critical resource security. 
But leadership does not begin when an industry is already mature. It begins when a country decides that an immature industry provides a strategic advantage and starts building the conditions to lead it. China has begun that process in solar recycling. This does not make Chinese leadership inevitable, but it does suggest long-term intent. What I saw was proof that solar recycling should be treated as something much bigger than waste management. U.S. leaders still have the opportunity to stay ahead rather than cede this industry to the same strategy that reshaped global solar manufacturing. 
Pablo Ribeiro Dias is chief technology officer at Solarcycle, a leading solar panel recycling company headquartered in Mesa, Arizona. Visit www.solarcycle.us for more information. 

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