Speaker

A truly circular economy for the photovoltaic industry and beyond

The photovoltaic (PV) industry faces a few challenges: keep on increasing its competitiveness to traditional energy sources with an expected 20% average annual installations growth rate, which in turn will create an increased material resources demand with an estimated of 900 000 tonnes annual polysilicon consumption and 14% of the world silver production dedicated to photovoltaic use today. It will also generate about 60 - 78 million tonnes of cumulative PV waste by 2050 worldwide. Therefore, reducing its dependence on primary raw materials and managing the upcoming PV waste are imminent challenges to overcome.
These challenges are at the same time a growing opportunity for breakthrough technologies to recover high-value materials enabling a circular economy. In this context, ROSI becomes a key player, as a company specialized in the production of circular materials from PV waste while ensuring low environmental impact of its industrial process. ROSI’s proprietary technology is based on mild chemistry and does not shred the PV modules, favoring up-cycling. It provides innovative solutions against the state-of-the-art to (1) recycle high purity raw materials such as silicon, silver, copper, aluminum, and glass from end-of-life (EOL) solar panels, (2) silicon and silver from solar cell fragments, and (2) recover highly pure silicon (Kerf loss) during the manufacturing process of solar wafers.
As the leading company in the world to recover critical and precious raw materials at high-purity from EOL PV modules and cell fragments, ROSI opened in 2023 its first industrial site in France. Based on this successful industrial-scale pilot demonstrator, ROSI is now targeting further expansion with large-scale industrial sites across Europe. Today, two additional industrial sites are under development, one in Germany and another in Spain, with respective recycling capacities up to 30 000 t/y and 10 000 t/y of EOL PV modules and cell fragments.
ROSI’s goal is to realize a truly circular economy for the PV industry and beyond. The high value recycling technology allows the reintegration of recovered materials into several key European industries, such as PV, batteries, semiconductors, and specialty chemistry. Therefore, ROSI’s activities support the European Union in strengthening its industry as well as securing, relocating, and decarbonizing its supply chain by providing raw materials recovered from waste.