SOLARCYCLE has started recycling solar panels at a massive new facility in Cedartown, Georgia, signaling that solar recycling in the US is finally moving from pilot projects to industrial scale.
The 255,000-square-foot plant is now processing thousands of end-of-life solar panels each week using the company’s proprietary next-gen recycling technology. SOLARCYCLE says the new lines deliver more than double the throughput of its earlier systems, while diverting 100% of material from landfills and recovering about 96% of the value locked up in silver, copper, aluminum, glass, and other critical materials in each panel.
The company plans to ramp the facility to about 1 million panels per year by the end of 2026. At full capacity, SOLARCYCLE says the site can handle up to 5 gigawatts’ worth of solar panels annually.
Cedartown is also the first piece of a larger, vertically integrated recycling and manufacturing campus. The recycling facility sits next to the site of SOLARCYCLE’s planned solar glass manufacturing plant, which is designed to turn recovered material back into new, domestically made solar glass. The company says it has already lined up customer commitments for more than 80% of the glass factory’s planned 5 GW capacity.
Construction on the glass plant is expected to begin in mid-2026, with first glass production targeted for 2028.
The timing isn’t accidental. Even with political headwinds in 2025, solar deployment in the US continues to surge, and that means a growing wave of panels will eventually need to be recycled at the end of their lifespans. According to the Energy Information Administration, utility-scale solar remains the fastest-growing source of electricity generation in the US. The agency forecasts that around 70 GW of new solar capacity will come online in 2026 and 2027, boosting total US operating solar capacity by roughly 49% compared with the end of 2025.
Read more: EIA: 99%+ of new US capacity in 2026 will be solar, wind + storage
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