Recycling of Waste Double-Glass Solar Panels

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Industry News Admin 2025-09-22 16:51:02 225

In the global process of advancing clean energy transition, solar photovoltaic (PV) power generation, as a common form of renewable energy utilization, maintains a growing installed capacity. Meanwhile, the issue of recycling and disposal of waste solar PV panels, especially double-glass PV panels, has gradually attracted attention from within and outside the industry. Due to their characteristics in terms of power generation efficiency and service life, double-glass PV panels have seen a certain expansion in market share. This means that some of these panels may face decommissioning in the next few years. Improper recycling and disposal could lead to resource waste and may also pose risks of environmental pollution. Therefore, the industry has practical demands for the efficiency and environmental friendliness of recycling technologies.

In the physical disassembly phase, the industry has begun to experiment with the application of "mobile" processing equipment, combined with automated programs and AI image recognition systems, to assist in the disassembly of frames and junction boxes, as well as the separation of glass and backsheets. This helps improve disassembly efficiency and accuracy, and the success rate of image recognition may remain above 95% in some scenarios. In the phase of material separation and recycling, the "green solvent method" has become one of the exploration directions. Specific solvents are used to attempt the dissociation of materials such as EVA (ethylene-vinyl acetate) and PV cells. Currently, in some experiments, the reaction rate and recovery rate of EVA have shown good performance, with technical indicators having a certain improvement compared to previous stages. Additionally, this technology does not use toxic mineral acids, which can reduce the risk of secondary pollution. Under experimental conditions, it has achieved good recovery results for silver and silicon in waste PV panels, providing a new research direction for recycling technologies.

With the gradual maturity of relevant technologies, the recycling and disposal industry for waste double-glass PV panels has begun to develop towards scale and standardization. Currently, some entities in the industry have laid out the R&D and production of recycling equipment. Through processes such as shredding, crushing, and sorting, waste PV panels can be converted into recyclable resources such as aluminum, glass, silicon powder, copper powder, and EVA plastic powder. At the same time, building a complete recycling industry chain has become a trend in the industry's exploration. From the initial layout of front-end recycling networks, to the coordination of mid-stream sorting, crushing, and extraction processing links, and then to the connection of back-end resource reuse, the coordination among various links has gradually strengthened. This provides a certain space for the development of the industry and also drives related employment.