#residential_solar_recycling
Building Solar Panel Recycling Capacity with SPR's Brett Henderson
Our guest is Brett Henderson, co-founder and CEO of https://solarpanelrecycling.com/, or SPR. The company owns and operates plants in North Carolina, Georgia, and Texas, with a fourth opening in California this year, each built to run about a million panels a year and to scale to 3 million within six months when needed. SPR is a https://seia.org/-approved national recycler and partnered with SEIA on the https://solarpanelrecycling.com/2025/02/solarpanelrecycling-com-and-seia-launch-pioneering-residential-solar-recycling-initiative-in-north-carolina/ in the country. Brett came to solar after 18 years in electronics recycling at https://powerhouserecycling.com/, SPR's parent company, and the business started in 2018 with a call from a longtime utility client that had 10,000 panels coming out of a power plant and nowhere to send them. Brett is blunt about the economics: recycling a panel is a negative value proposition, because a panel is mostly glass and glass is cheap. What SPR sells is risk mitigation. Federal rules treat an end-of-life panel as hazardous until testing proves otherwise, most owners have no idea what is inside the modules they bought, and a utility loading thousands of them onto trucks takes on generator liability and Department of Transportation exposure. Aluminum and silver recovery subsidizes the rest. That cost has fallen 42% in 36 months at SPR, driven by rebuilt separation lines and steadier volume rather than any subsidy, and scale is what opens the end markets.
www.spreaker.com
August 3, 2026 at 10:50 AM