Solarcycle, a new recycling company, officially launched today. The company based in Northern California was founded by industry pioneers, including Suvi Sharma (Solaria founder), Jesse Simons (National Program Director at the Sierra Club) and Pablo Dias (engineering lecturer at University of New South Wales).
Discarded solar cells. Credit: Solar Power World
“We’re proud to be leveraging the engineering and operational excellence we’ve learned from manufacturing modules and applying that to giga-scale PV recycling,” said Sharma, Solarcycle’s co-founder and CEO. “In doing so, we’re bolstering a circular economy that reuses existing domestic materials and minerals, and enhances the entire solar supply chain.”
Solarcycle is launching its operations with residential solar provider Sunrun. Solarcycle will use second-life panels from Sunrun to innovate and develop new ways to test, reuse and upcycle retired solar panels in Sunrun’s project portfolio. This partnership will pave the way for a scalable solution that will be available to the entire industry by year’s end.
“As Sunrun deploys PV systems at the scale needed to confront the climate crisis, we’ve embraced the responsibility and opportunity of managing the full lifecycle of our hardware,” said Mary Powell, CEO of Sunrun. “We are committed to sustainable end-of-life processes and excited to partner with an innovative company that shares our vision and is dedicated to creating a circular supply chain for the solar industry.”
“We have designed an advanced recycling solution that extracts the maximum value from every panel at the lowest possible cost. Our proprietary processes allow us to recover more than 95% of the vital materials needed for the rapid transition toward 100% clean energy – including silicon, silver, copper and aluminum. By vertically integrating our operations into a factory that can process gigawatts of solar annually, we can radically reduce costs and the climate impacts of the recycling process,” said Pablo Dias, co-founder and CTO of Solarcycle, who has extensive experience in e-waste and solar recycling.
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