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The United States has an older solar installation base than most countries. That means more panels are coming offline here, earlier, than anywhere else in the world. By 2030, the volume of end-of-life panels reaching retirement in the US will be significant. Most of them have nowhere to go.

Pablo Dias, spent over 15 years as a researcher, lecturer, and practitioner focused on photovoltaic recycling and sustainable materials recovery before co-founding SOLARCYCLE in 2022.He had developed processes in academia and watched the technology sit inside university walls without scaling commercially. So he joined forces with co-founders Jesse Simons and Suvi Sharma and launched in the US precisely because that is where the need was greatest.

SOLARCYCLE now operates three facilities across Arizona, Texas, and Georgia, processes over a million panels a year, and counts roughly 80 of the 120 largest solar asset owners in the US among its customers. The company is also the author of The Climate Change Book, the first domestic manufacturer of pattern glass from recycled panels, and one of the only recyclers in the world publishing peer-reviewed scientific papers on its own processes.

In this conversation with Arnaud Dasprez on The HEX-Files, Pablo walks through how SOLARCYCLE built credibility in a market riddled with bad actors, why trust is the actual product being sold, and what it means to create a supply chain that doesn’t yet exist. Keep reading for Pablo’s clear guidance on this topic. (And check out the full podcast episode here.)

"We don't need to extract things from Mother Earth."

SOLARCYCLE describes itself as a circular economy company, not a recycler. The distinction matters: a recycler processes waste; a circular economy company closes the loop, taking materials from old products and feeding them back into making new ones, so the need to mine virgin materials decreases over time.

Solar panels contain metals that are relatively straightforward to extract and sell: aluminum, copper, silver, glass, and polymers. The harder challenge is glass and polymers, where the domestic supply chain to absorb recovered material barely exists. The highest-value use for recovered solar glass is the production of new solar panels. But there is currently zero domestic manufacturing of patterned glass for solar panels in the US.

SOLARCYCLE’s response to that gap is to build the infrastructure that doesn’t exist. The company is constructing the first domestic manufacturing plant to take recovered solar glass and turn it into new solar panels. That is what a circular economy actually means in practice: not just processing waste, but building the downstream market that gives the recovered material its highest use.

"The more value we extract, the less we charge."

In Europe, solar panel recycling is mandatory under legislation. In the US, it is entirely voluntary. A company can legally landfill its panels. That market structure creates a fundamental challenge: you cannot rely on compliance to drive adoption. You have to compete on economics.

Pablo chose the US deliberately because of this constraint, not in spite of it. His thesis is that in a voluntary market, the recycler that extracts the most value from each panel can charge customers the least. Technology drives value extraction. Scale drives cost reduction. Do both simultaneously, and you close the gap between the costs of recycling and landfilling until they reach parity.

The aluminum story illustrates this concretely. When SOLARCYCLE first started, its recovered aluminum came out with enough contamination that it sold for only a fraction of the commodity index price. As technology improved and process control tightened, the material reached a purity level that now commands the full index price. That delta between contaminated output and pure output is the difference between a marginal business and a competitive one.

The same logic applies to glass. Today, SOLARCYCLE sells recovered glass to fiberglass insulation manufacturers. That diverts material from landfill, which is good, but it is not the highest-value use. The highest-value use is new solar panels, which is why the domestic manufacturing plant matters. Every step up the value chain for recovered materials means lower processing costs for customers and a stronger competitive position against landfilling.

"What you're really trying to buy here is peace of mind."

The recycling market has a trust problem. The barrier to entry is low enough that it is easy to establish a company, take fees for recycling services, skip the actual processing, and walk away when the money runs out. Customers end up as the legal generators of waste that was never properly handled. That has happened repeatedly in the recycling industry, and it has made sophisticated buyers deeply cautious.

Pablo’s framing of what buyers are actually purchasing cuts through the surface economics clearly. If one recycler charges $5 and another charges $2, the cheap option looks obvious. But the customer retains legal liability for the waste regardless of who they pay to handle it. A low bid that hides bad work is a deferred problem that lands back on the customer’s desk, often with regulatory consequences.

Trust, in this market, is the product being sold. And building it requires evidence that is difficult to fake:

  • Auditable mass balances that track every panel from intake to output.

  • A documented chain of custody showing where each material went after leaving the facility.

  • Quantified recovery rates and ESG metrics that give customers something to report.

  • Full compliance documentation that minimizes legal and regulatory risk for the asset owner.

Transparency about mistakes matters too. When something goes wrong—and in a young, high-volume operation, it will—telling customers upfront rather than concealing problems is what separates a long-term partnership from a transactional relationship. That posture, Pablo argues, is what builds the kind of trust that survives the inevitable difficulties of operating in a new industry.

"They really want to see the material going through."

SOLARCYCLE’s customer onboarding process reflects the trust dynamic directly. New customers move through a staged verification process that gets progressively more hands-on:

  • Paperwork: compliance documentation, tracking methodology, risk controls. 

  • Site audit: buyers visit one or more SOLARCYCLE facilities to see the operation in person. 

  • Traceability: a customer walks the floor, points at a random pallet, and asks where it came from. A QR code or label instantly answers the panel’s owner, origin, intake date, and processing status, all of it visible on demand.

That onboarding process is also a competitive filter. Companies unwilling to do the work of demonstrating compliance at that level tend to serve customers who do not ask hard questions. SOLARCYCLE’s customer base of roughly 80 of the 120 largest US solar asset owners reflects what happens when you consistently earn verification from the most rigorous buyers in the market. Those accounts become reference points that lower the skepticism of every new customer that comes behind them.

"We create a market that doesn't exist."

The glass manufacturing plant is the most visible example of SOLARCYCLE building its own downstream market, but it is not the only one. The company recently expanded into what the industry calls EBOS (electrical balance of systems), which covers the inverters, transformers, and skids that accompany a solar installation. These components reach end of life faster than the panels themselves, and asset owners want a single partner who can handle all of it. SOLARCYCLE’s expansion into EBOS is a direct response to that demand.

Geographic expansion is also on the horizon. Today, the company operates only in the US. Within five years, Pablo expects to be in additional countries, and within ten years, in many more. The constraint is the minimum viable volume. SOLARCYCLE’s model requires large-scale operations to be economically sound, so it will only enter markets where the panel volumes support that infrastructure.

The operational challenge underlying all of this growth is scale velocity. Asset owners do not want panels sitting on their sites for weeks. When a hail event damages a field of hundreds of thousands of panels, the owner needs them removed quickly so new panels can go in and energy production can resume. Being the largest recycler in the world today does not mean the capacity is sufficient for what’s coming. The market is growing exponentially, and the operational infrastructure has to grow ahead of it.

"Everything we've done so far has been organic."

SOLARCYCLE spends almost nothing on paid media. Its growth has come through a combination of founder credibility, thought leadership, and the compounding effect of operating transparently in a market where most players do not.

The thought leadership stack is more sophisticated than most companies of its age. LinkedIn is the primary social channel where SOLARCYCLE publishes real metrics alongside industry analysis covering solar manufacturing trends, deployment policy, and market developments. The company participates actively in trade shows and conferences, with keynotes and panel appearances that reinforce the founders’ authority in the space.

Beyond that, SOLARCYCLE publishes peer-reviewed scientific papers. Most recently, a life cycle assessment of a recycling process that the company was studying. A peer-reviewed paper does something no marketing claim can do: it opens the methodology to independent scrutiny. That level of transparency, Pablo argues, is what genuine thought leadership looks like in a technical field where credentials matter and skepticism is high.

Pablo also published The Climate Change Book, written from his years of teaching environmental impact measurement at the University of New South Wales. The book is aimed at general audiences who care about sustainability and want to understand what actions actually matter at a systemic level rather than at the level of individual behavior. The book extends his credibility to a wider audience and reinforces a consistent public identity built around scientific rigor and practical impact.

The underlying marketing logic is straightforward: in a new market where trust is scarce and bad actors are common, evidence compounds. Each peer-reviewed paper, each customer site audit, each keynote at a major trade show, each transparency report published on Earth Day makes the next customer conversation easier. SOLARCYCLE is riding genuine tailwinds in a fast-growing sector, but the organic growth it has achieved reflects deliberate choices about where to invest credibility rather than budget.

Explore more ideas and practical advice on this topic.

Catch the full conversation with Nir Brenmiller on The HEX-Files, HexaGroup’s energy marketing podcast for leaders who want real results.

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