We Recycle Solar to Launch America’s First Dedicated Critical Materials Recovery Plant for End-of-Life Solar Panels

Launching 2027 in Texas, first-of-its-kind solar recycling facility will reclaim silver, copper, aluminum, silicon, glass for America’s supply chain

YUMA, AZ, UNITED STATES, September 9, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- We Recycle Solar (WRS), America’s first dedicated, utility-scale solar panel recycling company, has announced plans for the nation’s first end-to-end critical materials recovery facility for retired solar panels. The first-of-its-kind commercial-scale plant, scheduled to launch Q3 2027 in Texas, will recover up to 96% of the silver, copper, silicon, aluminum, and glass contained in end-of-life solar panels, and produce clean, market-ready critical materials for direct resale through a fully-domestic process, with zero offshore processing.

Unlike conventional recycling methods that may send semiprocessed solar panel materials offshore for further recovery, the new WRS facility will process and recover valuable panel materials entirely within the U.S.—at a scale never before achieved domestically. The WRS plant will utilize a proprietary high-efficiency end-to-end critical mineral extraction process to achieve a throughput of one panel per minute, while bypassing the need for downstream smelting at overseas facilities.

The launch of the company’s next-generation capabilities marks an important turning point towards strengthening domestic critical material supply chains essential to major U.S. industrial sectors. For instance, silver—critical to solar energy, 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 controls an estimated 60-70% 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. 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 - but currently, an estimated 90% of America’s old solar panels go to landfill or 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,” said Adam Saghei, founder and CEO of We Recycle Solar. “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.”

Set on a 10-acre company campus outside Dallas, Texas—where solar power utilization is outpacing the nation—the new commercial-scale WRS plant will mark the first in the company's planned network of high-efficiency critical material recovery facilities. Within the next four years, WRS plans to invest an estimated $100 million to develop four additional locations across the United States, building a distributed network of domestic processing centers designed to reduce logistics costs and better serve commercial and utility-scale asset owners nationwide.

The new facilities will build on We Recycle Solar’s existing model of onsite decommissioning, recycling, and resale and expand the company’s recovery capabilities to include silicon, silver, copper, aluminum, and glass at commercial scale—all processed domestically and in compliance with all applicable federal, state, and local permitting requirements.

About We Recycle Solar
We Recycle Solar (WRS), founded in 2019 and headquartered in Yuma, Arizona, is America’s first dedicated, utility-scale solar panel recycling company, operating in accordance with applicable federal, state, and local environmental permits and regulatory requirements. WRS provides domestic recycling, lifecycle management, and critical materials recovery from old, damaged, or retired solar panels, along with onsite decommissioning, resale and remarketing across the U.S. WRS has diverted more than 1 million panels from landfills to date. For more information visit werecyclesolar.com.

Quanah Locklear
We Recycle Solar
+1 833-294-3512
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