#100 ROSI
Recycling solar panels at scale
Read time: 5 minutes
Hi, I’m Javi Gascón.
This is Climate Tech Distillery, a newsletter where I talk about one specific climate tech company every week.
Today we’ll distill a company that’s turning solar panels into a source of high-purity materials for the industries of tomorrow at scale: ROSI 🇫🇷
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What Problem Does ROSI Tackle❓
Solar panels generate clean energy for 25–30 years. Then 90% of them go to landfill. That's the dirty secret of the energy transition.
1. Incoming Waste Wave: Global PV (photovoltaic) panel waste could total 78 million tonnes by 2050, according to the International Energy Agency. The first large wave of panels from the 2000s solar boom is already reaching end of life.
2. Inefficient Recycling: Traditional shredding recovers aluminum frames and glass, the low-value stuff. Conventional methods recover only 35% of a panel's economic value. Silicon and silver, which represent the bulk of what a panel is worth, get lost in the process.
3. Broken Economics: Sending a panel to landfill costs $1–5. Recycling it costs around $18. Without a way to recover high-value materials efficiently, there's no business case for doing it right.
4. Silicon Importance: It’s a strategic raw material. Over 80% of global solar-grade silicon is produced in China. Every panel that goes to landfill destroys a local source of a material that governments everywhere are scrambling to secure.
5. Silver Scarcity. Silver represents less than 0.1% of a solar module by mass, but accounts for a significant share of its value. Solar is already one of the largest consumers of silver globally. Recycling it back into the supply chain is necessary.
Product / Service 📦
ROSI (stands for Return of Silicon) developed the world's first industrial process to recover high-purity silicon, silver, copper, aluminium, and glass from end-of-life solar panels:
Pyrolysis Separation: ROSI uses a low-intensity thermal and chemical treatment (pyrolysis) to gently break apart the layers of a panel without damaging the crystal structure of the silicon cells. The process achieves 99.9% pure silicon and silver at industrial scale.
Manufacturing Waste Too: ROSI also processes kerf, the silicon dust and slurry generated when wafers are cut during panel manufacturing. Two input streams instead of one: they have material to work with today, without waiting for the 2030s wave of retired panels.
Valuable Recovery: ROSI’s process increases economic value recovery from 35% (traditional shredding) to up to 95%.
Two Revenue Streams: ROSI earns fees for recycling panels (recycling-as-a-service) and for selling the recovered materials to industrial buyers. The combination is what makes the unit economics work at scale.
Top Quality Materials: The recovered materials meet or exceed virgin quality. Silicon purer than metallurgical-grade and glass more transparent than standard recycled glass. They feed directly into solar manufacturing, semiconductors, and electronics.
Market 🌐
The global solar panel recycling market is projected to grow from $0.46 billion in 2025 to $1.12 billion by 2030. But that undersells the opportunity. The materials ROSI recovers (silicon, silver, copper) feed into semiconductors, batteries, and electronics. Those are trillion-dollar industries.
Two forces are accelerating demand. Governments worldwide are racing to secure domestic supplies of silicon and silver, currently dominated by Chinese production. Recycled panels are a local source. And regulation is tightening fast: the EU already mandates 85% recovery rates by weight, and the rest of the world is catching up. Solar panel recycling is becoming mandatory, not optional.
Other Key Players
Reiling GmbH 🇩🇪: Europe's largest conventional recycler. Recovers glass and aluminium at scale. Doesn't touch silicon or silver.
SOLARCYCLE 🇺🇸: Recovers high-value materials including silicon and silver. US-focused, no European footprint.
Veolia 🇫🇷: Operates the first dedicated PV recycling plant in Europe since 2018. Recovers bulk materials including low-grade silicon. Doesn't achieve the purity levels needed for semiconductors or solar reuse.
ROSI is the only company with an industrial line recovering all five high-value materials from crystalline silicon panels.
Founding Story 🦄
ROSI was founded in 2017 in Grenoble by physicist Yun Luo, silicon specialist Guy Chichignoud, and industrial veteran Daniel Bajolet.
Yun grew up with a physics professor father who told her girls could do just as well as boys in science. She took that seriously. After years working in PV technology, she kept running into the same blind spot: nobody was dealing with solar waste.
She found her co-founders through her network. Guy had spent his entire career researching silicon purification and Daniel had led M&A deals across the silicon industry. Together they decided to tackle the problem.
The first breakthrough came when a scientist at Evonik confirmed that ROSI's recycled silicon could re-enter the silicon value chain. That unlocked everything. Backed by French government grants and early investors, they built their first industrial site. In June 2023 they inaugurated ROSI Alpes, the first industrial recycling line worldwide capable of recovering high-purity silicon, silver, and copper from end-of-life panels.
In September 2024 they signed a partnership with AGC Glass Europe (one of the world's largest flat glass manufacturers) to supply them with recycled solar glass and in April 2026 they closed a Series B of over €20M to open a second plant in Teruel, Spain (10,000 tonnes/year). Total raised to date: ~$50M.
Top Impact Stats 📈
1. ROSI's recovered silicon has 75% lower CO₂ emissions than conventionally produced metallurgical-grade silicon.
2. Their process recovers up to 95% of a panel's economic value and outputs industrial-scale 99.9% pure silicon and silver.
3. By replacing conventionally produced raw materials they save 1.2 tonnes of CO₂ per tonne of panels recycled.
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