University of Newcastle researchers have successfully scaled up a process that recovers silver from end-of-life solar panels, demonstrating almost 100% recovery during what they claim is the world’s first continuous pilot-scale flotation trial for solar panel recycling.
Building on previous efforts showing that froth flotation – a mineral-processing technique widely used in the mining industry – could recover silver from solar waste without using acid, the research team recovered high-grade silver from almost half a tonne of end-of-life solar panels.
“Our earlier small-scale batch research proved flotation could recover silver from solar panels,” lead researcher Associate Professor Mahshid Firouzi, Deputy Director of the University of Newcastle’s Centre for Critical Minerals and Urban Mining, said.
“This latest work demonstrates that the process can operate continuously at a much larger scale with nearly 100% silver recovery, bringing us closer to commercial implementation.”
During the pilot-scale trial, the researchers processed 22 kilograms of solar-cell material recovered from 468 kg of solar panels. Under continuous operating conditions covering a period of about 90 minutes, almost 100% of the silver was recovered and concentrated it into a high-value product representing just 1.25% of the original material. The resulting product contained more than 80 times the silver concentration of the original solar cell material.
“The results demonstrate that the flotation separation is robust, rapid and scalable,” the researchers said, with Firouzi adding that the challenge is no longer whether silver can be recovered from solar panels, but whether it can be recovered at a scale and cost that made recycling commercially viable.
“Silver is the highest-value material in a solar cell,” she said. “Recovering it has the potential to make solar-panel recycling far more financially attractive.”
More than one million tonnes of waste panels – containing an estimated 300–500 tonnes of silver – is expected in Australia by 2035. Currently, only a small percentage of end-of-life panels are recycled, with most ending in landfill.
Recycling solar panels is currently estimated to cost about $10 to $15 per panel, compared with only a few dollars to send a panel to landfill but Firouzi said recovering silver could help shift that equation.
“At the moment, recycling often costs more than landfill,” she said. “But if recyclers can efficiently recover and sell the silver contained within solar panels, that changes the economics completely.”
The team’s early assessment suggests the flotation-based process could be three to five times less expensive than conventional acid-leaching approaches, which can be costly to scale due to their reliance on large volumes of chemicals and the management of hazardous waste.
“We’re applying proven mineral-processing technology to one of the fastest-growing waste streams in the renewable energy sector,” Firouzi said, adding that recovering critical minerals from waste streams will become increasingly important as Australia continues its transition to renewable energy.
“If we’re serious about building a circular economy, we need to think not only about how we generate clean energy, but also how we recover the materials that make those technologies possible.”
The research findings appeared in Continuous flotation unlocks full recovery of silver from end-of-life solar cells, released as a preprint in ChemRxiv.
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