Recovering value from retired solar panels.

Retired doesn't mean worthless. SUNREC uses intelligent mobile triage and advanced recovery technologies to identify, recover and redirect value from every panel — whether through reuse, refurbishment or material recovery.

2M t
Cumulative UK solar panel waste by 2050
0.5%
Of panels actually recycled in Spain today
3
Revenue streams from one retired panel
Why it matters

A recycling wave is arriving, and it's leaving money on the table.

400,000+ t
Panels already awaiting collection and treatment in Spain
16.5%
Share of global silver supply the solar industry consumes each year
€86M
Public funding earmarked for solar and battery recycling under Spain's Renocicla programme

Today's recyclers strip out the glass and the aluminium frame — low-margin materials — and throw away the rest. Buried in that "rest" is high-purity silver and silicon, the two materials that make up most of a panel's real economic value.

How it works

From a retired panel to three separate buyers.

01
Panel retired
Collected from a decommissioned installation or a failed unit.
02
Mobile triage
A deployable unit diagnoses whether the panel still performs well enough for a second life.
03
Second life, or frame & glass removed
Working panels go to the marketplace. The rest is stripped on-site and sold locally.
04
Cell fraction shipped to the hub
Only the silver-bearing material travels — under one permitted facility, not many.
05
Silver & silicon recovered
Delamination, electrostatic concentration and hydrometallurgy recover what everyone else discards.

Three separate buyers, one panel: a marketplace buyer for second-life units, a local scrap buyer for aluminium and glass, and a metals buyer for recovered silver.

Technology & IP

Two of these already exist. We're not starting from a blank page.

Already built
Working

Proprietary frame-removal system

Mechanically strips the aluminium frame from a retired panel without damaging the glass or cell laminate underneath.

Prototype

Second-life classifier

A low-scale, working prototype that diagnoses which retired panels still qualify for resale.

Building next
Roadmap

AI-enhanced diagnostic engine

EL imaging, IV-curve analysis and computer vision, improving with every panel the network processes.

Roadmap

Sensor-assisted separation

Pushing past today's published recovery-versus-purity ceiling in electrostatic concentration.

Why now

The regulatory and market timing lines up.

Tighter WEEE regulation

Mandatory digital waste tracking and tougher fines from 2026 in the UK, with an equivalent framework tightening across the EU.

Structural silver scarcity

Solar already consumes a significant share of global silver supply. Recycling is one of the few available levers on the supply side.

New EU waste shipment rules

Regulation (EU) 2024/1157 phases in from May 2026 — a window to get ahead with an already-compliant process.

First-mover window

Genuine waste volume is already growing fast in Spain, and grows structurally across the rest of Europe from the mid-2030s.

Where we are

R&D in Scotland. Operations across the EU.

Scotland, UK

Home base. R&D, mobile-unit manufacturing, and the software behind our diagnostics and marketplace.

Headquarters

Spain

First deployment market — mobile triage, pilot permits, and the early marketplace listings.

Pilot underway

EU recovery hub

A single centralised site handling delamination and hydrometallurgical silver recovery.

Planned

Let's talk.

Investor, solar operator, or someone who wants to send us panels — we want to hear from you.