An agreement to accept materials from an Ohio company is the latest move in a busy year for Comstock Metals, which has spent the past several months expanding and building up its solar panel recycling infrastructure.
Nevada-based Comstock announced a deal with Illuminate USA on Tuesday to recycle byproducts resulting from panel production in its facility in Pataskala, Ohio. That plant contains eight manufacturing lines and creates more than 9 million panels per year at full capacity.
Also this month, Comstock completed integration of a robotic loading and initial conveyance system for its solar panel recycling production line in Silver Springs, Nevada. Company leadership said these front-end stages are working better than projected, and that the rest of the production system should be operational on a continuous basis by August. That represents the latest step in the expansion of the facility, which will be able to process 100,000 tons of material per year. The facility first opened about three years ago and achieves 100% material recovery.
That site is getting up to speed just as the company announced expansion plans. Comstock announced last month it’s building a panel recycling and production facility in Cambridge, Ohio, to join the Nevada facility and one in Hanford, California, that opened this past January. That 21,570-foot facility will serve the Midwest and East Coast, producing aluminum, silver and glass bead materials while creating 20 full-time jobs.
The expansion comes a few months after Comstock announced plans to establish a storage facility for end-of-life panels in Ohio. Its growth in Ohio gives Comstock potential regional access to a number of solar manufacturing facilities in the Buckeye State, including First Solar, OMCO Solar and APA Solar Racking.
“Our new Cambridge facility in Ohio is an integral part of our growing national capacity of logistics, storage and recycling,” said Comstock CEO Corrado De Gasperis, who noted the new location can cut material transportation costs 30%-50%. “The speed that we build these human systems and deploy our recycling network is critical to keeping these hazardous materials out of our landfills, communities and ecosystems.”
Growing a panel recycling infrastructure will become important as energy solar systems age. The U.S. Department of Energy said most panels installed now can remain useful for up to 35 years, and about 70% of the nation’s solar energy systems have been installed since 2019, so an influx of expired materials isn’t expected for a while. But early installations are hitting the waste stream, and only around 10% of those panels currently get recycled.
The Illumination deal is the latest entered into by Comstock to bolster recycling capabilities; company leadership said Comstock has collaborated on the recycling of more than 4 million pounds of materials per year before this deal.
The company and Virtus Renewable agreed last summer to jointly create a recycling and logistics network, bolstering capabilities while addressing what De Gasperis called gaps in the panel recycling industry. A few months prior, Comstock agreed to provide recycling and logistics services for RWE Clean Energy, which installs solar energy systems nationwide.
Illuminate’s 1.1 million-square-foot facility creates enough panels to generate more than 5 GW of energy per year, company leadership said. The Ohio facility opened in 2024 and agreed last summer to use recycled solar glass made by Solarcycle when that product becomes available in 2028.
“Our new partnership with Comstock metals strengthens our commitment to environmental responsibility,” said Bryan Kresak, Illuminate vice president of environment, health, safety and facilities. “Together, we are taking these important steps to ensure that our operations reflect our deeply held values and advance sustainable practices across the industry.”
Comstock Metals is a subsidiary of Comstock Inc., a former mining company that commercializes technologies and systems in fields like biofuels, metal recycling and AI-powered mining.
