ROSI Solar, a specialist solar recycling company which owns a recycling facility in the Alpine city of Grenoble, France, hopes to be able to extract and re-use 99% of a PV panel's components.

This announcement comes as experts are express concerns that end-of-life PV panels would be dumped into land fills and create environmental problems. Experts say billions of panels will eventually all need to be disposed of and replaced. Ute Collier, the deputy director of the International Renewable Energy Agency is quoted as saying that unless industry starts developing PV panel recycling plants immediately, there will be a “waste mountain by 2050”.

The company says that the world's first factory dedicated to fully recycling solar panels will officially open in France at the end of June. As well as recycling the glass fronts and aluminium frames, the new factory can recover nearly all of the precious materials contained within the panels, such as silver and copper, which are typically some of the hardest materials to extract. These rare materials can subsequently be recycled and reused to make new, more powerful, solar units.

The reason there are so few facilities for recycling solar panels is because there has not been much waste to process and reuse until recently. The first generation of domestic solar panels is only now coming to the end of its usable life, so recycling is becoming more urgent.

Currently, end-of-life PV panels are collected in Europe through a scheme financed by panel manufacturers and importers. In a few countries, pilot recycling lines have been installed but they merely recover the aluminium frame, the junction box containing copper, and potentially the front glass panel. No recycling line is currently able to properly recover the materials encapsulated in the modules. The major technical challenge is to separate properly these materials that each has a high purity and a resale value able to finance the recycling activity.

The company says it has developed the technology needed to separate the materials contained within the end-of-life PV panels. It can recover the ultrapure silicon from the cell as well as the silver fingers used to collect the electric current generated by each cell. Moreover, the processes used are based on physical, thermal and soft chemistry mechanisms. No aggressive chemicals are used. The new plant will open during a boom period for solar panel installations, the company says.