The commercial-scale plant is slated to open in Texas in the third quarter of 2027.
Posted by Chris Voloschuk, Associate Editor
Utility-scale solar panel recycling company We Recycle Solar Inc. (WRS) says it plans to build an end-to-end material recovery facility (MRF) for retired solar panels in the United States.
The company, headquartered in Yuma, Arizona, says the commercial-scale plant is scheduled to launch in the third quarter of 2027 near Dallas and will recover up to 96 percent of the silver, copper, silicon, aluminum and glass contained in end-of-life panels, turning them into clean, market-ready critical materials for direct resale through a fully domestic process, with no offshore processing.
WRS claims that unlike “conventional recycling methods” that could send semiprocessed solar panel materials offshore for further recovery, its new facility will process and recover panel materials entirely within the U.S., at a scale it says has yet to be achieved domestically. The facility will use a proprietary “critical mineral extraction process” to achieve a throughput of one panel per minute while bypassing the need for downstream smelting at overseas facilities.
WRS says the facility’s launch marks an important turning point toward strengthening domestic critical material supply chains essential to major U.S. industrial sectors. For instance, the company says silver, which is critical to solar energy, artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, defense systems, electronics and the power grid, is entering its sixth consecutive year of structural global deficits as industrial demand continues to outpace global supply. New export-licensing requirements introduced in January by China, which WRS says controls an estimated 60-70 percent of the global supply, have added further uncertainty to global silver markets, heightening concerns about critical material supply chain resilience and security.
“In the U.S., where solar is now the fastest-growing electricity source, retired solar panels represent a significant untapped source of critical materials,” WRS says, adding that by 2050, the U.S. is projected to hold the world’s largest stockpile of end-of-life solar panels behind China, worth more than $80 billion in recyclable materials. WRS says that currently, an estimated 90 percent of America’s old solar panels go to landfill or are shipped to offshore processing centers, predominantly in Asia, where a significant share of the critical materials they contain are recovered and removed from the American supply chain entirely.
“Solar panels contain the exact critical materials the U.S. supply chain desperately needs, but until now, no American company has been able to recover their full resources at such scale or efficiency,” WRS founder and CEO Adam Saghei says. “Through our advanced process, we are achieving true, comprehensive material recovery entirely on U.S. soil, and retaining these critical materials—and the value currently being lost to Asian processing—within our domestic supply chain.”
WRS says the facility will sit on a 10-acre campus and mark the company’s first in a planned network of recycling facilities. Within the next four years, the company says it plans to invest an estimated $100 million to develop four additional locations across the U.S., building a distributed network of domestic processing centers designed to reduce logistics costs and better serve commercial- and utility-scale asset owners nationwide.
WRS says the new facilities will build on its existing model of on-site decommissioning, recycling and resale and expand the company’s recovery capabilities to include silicon, silver, copper, aluminum and glass at commercial scale.

source