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The solar industry’s growing appetite for silver is creating an opportunity that could eventually help address one of its most important raw-material challenges: recovering the precious metal from the panels it has spent decades installing.
Canadian clean-tech company RZOLV Technologies reported on October 26 that its proprietary, non-cyanide recovery process extracted nearly all the silver from concentrated material recovered from end-of-life solar panels in bench-scale testing. The company reported silver extraction of 99.9%, with its detailed results indicating extraction of up to 99.99% after 24 hours.
The results are encouraging, particularly as solar manufacturing competes with other industrial users for silver. However, the company has yet to demonstrate the recovery of a verified quantity of refined, saleable silver from the process.
The distinction is important. Extracting silver into a solution is not the same as producing a commercially saleable metal product, and laboratory performance does not automatically translate into profitable industrial operations.
Silver is a critical component of conventional crystalline-silicon solar cells, where it is used in electrical contacts that collect the electricity generated by the cell.
According to some figures cited, the solar industry consumed approximately 186.6 million ounces of silver in 2025, equivalent to a substantial share of annual global silver demand. Although manufacturers have been reducing silver consumption per cell and exploring alternatives such as copper, the metal remains important to mainstream solar production.
The pressure is not simply about price. The International Energy Agency’s Photovoltaic Power Systems Programme (IEA PVPS), in a September 2026 report on future photovoltaic material flows, identified recycling and material substitution as important considerations for sustaining solar expansion over the coming decades.
Its modelling suggests that silver recovered from solar recycling could potentially meet 30–45% of cumulative solar-sector silver demand between 2025 and 2050, depending on deployment and technology scenarios.
This is a long-term potential, rather than a forecast of what recyclers can supply today. Much of the installed solar fleet is still operating, and the volumes of retired panels available for processing will vary considerably between markets.
Nevertheless, the figures indicate that end-of-life panels could become an important secondary source of silver as the industry matures.
RZOLV’s approach is based on recovering silver from a concentrated fraction of the panel rather than chemically processing the entire module.
According to the company, mechanical processing can produce approximately 40 kilograms of silver-bearing cell material from one tonne of solar panels. This represents around 4% of the original panel mass, allowing subsequent chemical treatment to focus on a smaller stream of material.
In its latest tests, the company used a water-based hydrometallurgical process designed to extract silver without cyanide-based reagents.
Independent laboratory assays of the feed material and final washed residue were used to calculate silver extraction. Subsequent electrowinning tests indicated that 99.85% of the dissolved silver concentration was removed from solution over five hours. Electrowinning uses an electric current to recover dissolved metal.
RZOLV also reported that approximately 10% of its reagent was consumed during testing, suggesting that much of the reagent could potentially be reused in subsequent processing cycles.
These results offer several potential advantages: less material requiring chemical treatment, the possibility of lower reagent costs and a route to recovering a high-value metal that might otherwise be lost in conventional recycling.
However, the company acknowledges that further work is required to establish the quantity, purity and overall yield of recovered silver, reconcile the material balance and account for refining losses.
Silver recovery could help improve the economics of solar-panel recycling, where the value of recovered materials has traditionally been concentrated in relatively easy-to-separate components such as aluminium frames and glass.
Silver can account for a disproportionate share of a crystalline-silicon module’s recoverable value despite representing only a tiny fraction of its weight. In recent months, with Silver prices at highs, we have seen forms double down on ways to reduce silver use in cells in India as well.
Specialist recovery processes require investment, reliable supplies of discarded panels and sufficient throughput to justify their operating costs. Collection, transportation, dismantling, chemical processing and refining all influence the final economics.
These challenges are particularly significant in markets where retired panels are geographically dispersed or volumes remain too low to sustain dedicated recycling facilities.
RZOLV says it is in discussions with manufacturers, recyclers, technology providers and refiners to explore a potential supply chain. Whether those discussions lead to commercial partnerships will be an important next step.
For manufacturers, recovered silver could eventually provide an additional source of supply. For recyclers, it could create a higher-value business model that makes processing discarded modules more attractive. For policymakers, it strengthens the case for treating end-of-life panels as a source of recoverable resources rather than merely a waste-management problem.
There is, however, a competing development: as solar manufacturers work to reduce silver consumption and substitute copper in cell metallisation, such substitution could reduce the amount of silver required per unit of solar capacity, changing the economics of future recover
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