Nevada-based Comstock Metals has announced a solar material recycling services agreement with Illuminate USA. Under the agreement, Comstock Metals will manage the transportation, sorting and recycling of solar panel manufacturing byproducts from Illuminate USA’s facility in Pataskala, Ohio.
The partnership aims to provide a zero-landfill solution that repurposes materials into new industrial goods and eliminates downstream liability. Comstock Metals has touted its ability to recover 100% of useful materials from end-of-life solar panels using a proprietary thermal process that separates panel components and spits out raw aluminum, glass and metal.
Illuminate USA began production at its 1.1 million-square-foot Pataskala facility in February, 2024. The company says the factory is the largest single-site solar panel manufacturing facility in North America, with an annual production capacity of 5 GW.
The announcement of the Illuminate partnership comes several months after Comstock Metals announced plans to build an industrial-scale recycling and logistics hub in Cambridge, Ohio — just over 60 miles from Illuminate’s facility.
Other recycling partnerships
The agreement with Illuminate USA builds on a series of recent strategic partnerships for Comstock Metals. In April 2025, the company entered into a master services agreement with RWE Clean Energy to provide recycling, decommissioning, and logistics services for the developer’s U.S. solar installations.
According to Comstock Metals, the companies had already collaborated on the recycling of more than 4 million pounds of end-of-life solar materials in Nevada and California prior to that agreement.
In June 2025, Comstock Metals formed a strategic partnership with Virtus Renewables to create an integrated recycling and logistics network for solar markets. The company says its zero-landfill process recovers 100% of materials — including aluminum, copper, silver, and glass — for reuse in domestic supply chains.
In August, 2025, Illuminate USA announced an agreement to purchase recycled solar glass from Solarcycle, to support the production of 3 GW of modules annually for 5 years. At the time of the announcement, delivery of glass from the recycler’s Cedartown, Georgia facility was expected to begin in 2028.
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