Silver makes up roughly 0.5% of a solar cell’s mass, yet accounts for 47% of its recycling value, according to a May 2026 research paper on PV recycling in Science Bulletin – an imbalance that dictates much of how recyclers approach end-of-life panels.
SPR, whose North Carolina operation grew out of a two-decade-old electronics recycling company, has spent years developing its solar recycling process around those economic realities. With a key solar recycling certification deadline looming in January 2027, CEO Brett Henderson spoke with pv magazine about where SPR stands, how the company thinks about recovery rates, and what he is seeing in reuse markets.
pv magazine: Where does SPR’s North Carolina facility stand with regard to R2V3 Appendix G? Are you fully certified, mid-audit, or working toward a target date ahead of the January 2027 deadline?
Brett Henderson: SPR was formed out of a parent company that was an R2V3 and e-steward certified electronics recycler in business for about two decades … My concerns about that in the solar industry is solar modules are basically a singular line item … they’re more or less negative value to process because it’s mostly glass composition. So our concerns with the R2V3 on the solar side, even though we fully support it and have been abiding by it for about 16 years on the parent company side, is that the Appendix G still allows the recycling to be outsourced while someone carries that certification … the glass needs to be recovered cleanly, not commingled and recovered by that certified company in-house.
At the moment, we’re kind of to be determined on the R2V3 in our North Carolina facility … So our compliance team, by the direction of myself, is kind of basically we have up until 2027 to kind of decide if we want to, you know, get it to that appendix.
If SPR decides not to pursue Appendix G, what are the implications – for SPR and for the industry?
If it’s a standalone solar company and there’s no asset owners requiring it for an RFP or requiring it to be onboarded as a vendor, there isn’t really any pressure to a standalone solar company to get the Appendix G correct.
Our North Carolina facility, we’re building standalone solar building. That would be done before that deadline. So there won’t be any – having to go by the Appendix G since it’s a separate company isn’t something that’s going to happen … there is a good bit of them that are on this committee that’s been working in the background for 18 months to make this gold standard through the major trade association in the US. It seems the pulse of the committee as a whole is ‘let’s make a standard specific for this industry,’ not just an appendix to it.
Do you anticipate any impact on recycling volume if a meaningful share of the industry misses this deadline?
No, because again, we’re not manufacturing a product. We’re demanufacturing a product … None of the major US EPCs, O&Ms, utilities are requiring this standard. So if somebody does not hold this standard at the moment, it’s not going to affect throughput recycling in the US market, none of the above.
In a recent IEA-PVPS Task 12 report on recovery rates and process, the figures cited for SPR are 99% copper recovery and up to 98% silicon recovery. Are these numbers from independent third-party testing, or self-reported?
It’s a little bit of a hybrid of both. So IEA did not require us … to send samples off to them or to a third party lab for them to confirm. But when they were doing their research, their questionnaires, their interviews, understanding our processes, they highly recommended and wanted to see some third-party lab results … yes, we do have tests behind that, but the IAE specifically didn’t … have those samples sent off or any type of lab reporting on their end.
How does SPR mechanically separate silicon, glass, and other materials during processing?
What gets conflated a lot on the mechanical side is taking full solar panels, batch feeding them through a shredder and shredding them down … as a whole, and then trying to find ways to separate the different type of commodities within that. That type of mechanical processing is always going to lead to contaminated products.
What we have at SPR is mostly a mechanical process … what we’re doing is we are systematically removing each commodity … This is where we’ve already had $12 million of investment this year alone on some new glass technology … How do you take the layers, encapsulated glass and silicon and backsheet and cleanly separate them? Because if your glass is contaminated with plastics and silicon and silver and other metals, it’s not going to be able to be actually consumed at volume and at scale in different glass manufacturing.
Is SPR profitable on recycling alone, or are other revenue lines important?
We’re profitable recycling alone under the industry … with the asset owners paying some level of a recycling fee … That fee has came down tremendously since we started in 2018, like almost 80% at this point, and that’s mainly because we keep investing in two things. We keep investing in technology to get the cleanest separation … but also the major driving cost force in the industry, specifically in the US that’s such a large geographical footprint, is transportation.
What’s the biggest cost driver, and which costs do you expect to fall fastest as volume scales toward the end of the decade?
Definitely the cost driver in the US market is going to be transportation … So it’s quite important that we continuously build out our owned and operated distributed network of recycling facilities. The biggest opportunities for costing to come down even further is going to be more clean glass hitting the market in the United States and it being able to stay more regional … I think the biggest driver is just going to be in any industry, in any recycling industry, volume is king.
You mentioned solar reuse as a competing force in the industry. What’s happening there?
What’s going on at the moment globally is there’s quite a bit of greenwashing happening on this reuse side … what’s happening globally is aluminum is trading high enough now that you could take panels for free from acid owners, say they’re going to be reused, and a lot of panels are starting to get shipped overseas, whether that’s Southeast Asia, whether it’s the west coast of Africa. We probably get pinged maybe 10 to 15 times a week as one of the global solar recycling brands from companies that say that they want to buy reused solar panels. Here’s the issue with it.
The reuse market is nowhere near any level of scalability. And the reason for that … is there’s major regulations about connecting used panels back to the grid … In the US specifically, the UL rating is no longer valid once that panel becomes used … You can load about 500 to 550 of these modules on a container. A company could absorb the shipping costs … and have limited to no labor costs … and what’s happening is this is all under the guise of ‘hey these panels are going to be reused elsewhere.’
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