Smashing Solar Panels Offers $80 Billion Alternative to Landfill

Inside a noisy industrial plant on the outskirts of Yuma, Arizona, there’s a machine that smashes old solar panels into bits. It can handle 10 panels a minute, as many as 7,500 a day, extracting bits of copper and silver and aluminum, and pulverizing most of the rest into a gritty powder.

It’s the biggest US site for recycling old photovoltaic panels, according to We Recycle Solar Inc., a four-year-old startup that owns the plant. The company sees a growing business opportunity handling panels that would otherwise end up in a landfill. With potentially billions of panels needing disposal in the coming years, the ...