The Elements of Innovation Discovered
Metal Tech News – October 26, 2026
At more than 150 million ounces per year, solar panel manufacturing accounts for nearly 20% of annual silver consumption.
RZOLV’s water-based leaching solution recovered 99.9% of the silver from an end-of-life solar panel concentrate.
With more than 150 million ounces of silver going into the production of solar panels each year, a high-value recycling opportunity is emerging as the early generations of these converters of sunlight into clean electricity reach the end of their useful lives. With recent lab testing indicating that its water-based leaching solution can extract nearly 100% of the silver from solar-panel concentrate, RZOLV Technologies Inc. is positioning itself to seize that circular opportunity.
“Silver is a key source of value in solar recycling, and our goal is to recover it as a saleable product through an integrated clean-technology process,” said RZOLV President and CEO Duane Nelson.
According to the Washington, DC-based Silver Institute, roughly 186.6 million oz of silver went into solar panels during 2025. At the $40/oz average price that year, that comes to roughly $7.5 billion. While high silver prices have compelled solar manufacturers to use less of the precious metal and substitute copper when possible, it is forecast that more than 151 million oz will go into solar panels this year. At an estimated average silver price of roughly $73/oz for 2026, that represents more than $11 billion worth of silver.
Depending on their age and design, solar panels can contain between 150 and 600 grams (4.8 to 19.3 oz) of silver per metric ton – concentrations comparable to mid- to high-grade ore being extracted at modern mines.
And the volume of this potential aboveground silver resource is expected to grow enormously over the coming decades.
According to the International Renewable Energy Agency, annual global end-of-life solar-panel volumes are forecast to exceed 3 million metric tons by 2035 and surge past 25 million tons by 2050.
This growing stream of silver, copper, and other valuable materials contained in retired solar panels offers an increasingly compelling opportunity for recyclers capable of recovering these metals economically.
RZOLV believes its proprietary non-cyanide leaching solution could offer an efficient and more eco-friendly method of extracting the precious metal value from photovoltaic panels.
One potential advantage of recycling silver from solar panels is that mechanical separation can concentrate the silver-bearing material into a small fraction of the original panel mass before chemical processing.
According to RZOLV, mechanical processing can produce approximately 40 kilograms of silver-bearing cell dust from each metric ton of solar panels. This concentrate, representing just 4% of the original panel mass, could allow subsequent hydrometallurgical processing to focus on the silver-rich material rather than the entire panel.
Recent laboratory testing indicates that RZOLV’s water-based leaching solution is particularly effective at extracting silver from concentrated solar panel material.
RZOLV’s water-based leaching solution recovered 99.9% of the silver from an end-of-life solar panel concentrate.
Based on independent assays of the feed and washed residue conducted by ALS, RZOLV calculated that its solution extracted 99.99% of the silver contained in the tested solar-panel concentrate after 24 hours.
Subsequent electrowinning testing, which uses an electric current to recover dissolved metals from solution, recovered 99.85% of the silver out of solution over five hours.
Together, these results indicate the potential to extract nearly all the silver from concentrated solar-panel material and recover it through an integrated hydrometallurgical process.
“Achieving 99.9% silver extraction from the solar panel concentrate tested, is an encouraging milestone,” Nelson said.
While the results demonstrate near-complete silver extraction and removal from solution, RZOLV has yet to confirm the overall recovery of refined, saleable silver. That will require weighing and assaying the recovered metal, reconciling the silver mass balance, and accounting for any refining losses.
Of potential significance to the economics of the process is that only 10% of RZOLV’s proprietary reagent was consumed during testing.
The company says this low consumption rate indicates that approximately 90% of the reagent could remain available for reuse in subsequent leaching cycles, supporting the development of a closed-circuit platform designed to lower reagent costs and reduce waste.
Combining this potentially reusable leaching solution with mechanical separation that reduces the amount of material requiring chemical processing could be key to establishing an economical method of recycling silver from retired solar panels.
With the encouraging lab-scale results in hand, RZOLV is engaging with potential process partners to scale up its technology alongside the rapidly expanding end-of-life solar-panel market.
“We are currently in discussions with several manufacturers, recyclers, technology providers and refiners to help build a global circular supply chain – recovering silver from end-of-life solar panels and returning it to manufacturing,” Nelson said.
Shane Lasley is the founder and publisher of Metal Tech News, where he covers the minerals, metals, and materials that make modern technology possible.
A journalist with nearly two decades of experience covering mining and mineral development, Lasley has expanded his reporting beyond where metals come from to explore what makes them valuable — the unique properties that allow elements such as lithium, rare earths, graphite, gallium, germanium, copper and dozens of others to enable advances in energy, transportation, electronics, aerospace, defense, and emerging technologies.
His reporting follows the entire materials story, from mineral discovery and mine development through processing, supply chains, materials science, and the technologies that ultimately put those resources to work.
Lasley has a particular interest in critical minerals and the increasingly interconnected relationship between mineral resources, technological innovation, energy security, global supply chains, and geopolitics. Through Metal Tech News, he seeks to give readers a deeper understanding of the materials behind innovation and why securing their supply matters.
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