The faucet is open, and what started as a trickle is becoming a flood.
Landfill operators and haulers that used to collect a handful of solar panels are beginning to become confronted with tens of thousands at a time. The influx of retiring panels is largely driven by utility-scale “repowerings” in which functional but less-efficient panels are swapped out en masse, Sarah Damaskos, managing director, Commercial Solar Panel Recycling, told Resource Recycling in a recent conversation.
As of early 2023, approximately 375 million solar panels were deployed across the US, and roughly 7%, or 28 million, had already been in the field for a decade or more. That number is expected to double by 2030, according to Bob Nicholson, senior manager of photovoltaic recycling for the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA).
Damaskos noted that it’s actually the solid waste industry, not regulators or manufacturers, sounding the loudest alarm as the waste infrastructure struggles to manage the tsunami wave of retired solar panels.
“The brakes are actually coming from the solid waste people who are saying, we don’t want this in our dump,” she said.
The US solar industry added 43.2 gigawatts direct current (GWdc) of capacity in 2025, a 14% drop from the prior year, according to SEIA. The utility-scale sector saw the sharpest pullback, falling nearly 40% quarter-over-quarter in the fourth quarter alone.
Shifting tax credit rules changed the game for manufacturers. As the deadline pressure to get projects connected to the grid eased, the incentive to break ground on new ones picked up.
For the solid waste industry, it’s more important to track what’s coming down the pipeline to know what to expect in terms of volume. Solar accounted for 54% of all new electricity-generating capacity added to the US grid last year.
With a typical lifespan of 25 to 30 years, utility-scale installations that are driving solar capacity numbers will begin reaching end of life in volume by the 2050s, with early losses from storm damage, repowerings and re-roofing already accelerating that timeline, Damaskos indicated.
Volume is already straining the system. Solid waste facilities that used to see a handful of panels are now fielding calls about tens of thousands, and the recycling infrastructure to handle what’s coming is filled with potholes in the logistics of managing retiring panels. States are turning to regulation to fill the gap.
In January 2026, New Jersey became the first state to pass a mandatory solar panel recycling law, S3399, without an extended producer responsibility (EPR) framework. This is a deliberate departure from Washington State’s EPR approach, which has struggled to gain traction due to friction with manufacturers and a limited market, according to Damaskos.
“It’s Washington, you know, it’s half rain. Their market is small and their market power, as a result, is small, and so they’re not getting a lot of buy in the meantime,” she said.
However, regulation alone won’t close the gap, she noted. Hauling and logistics remain the lingering challenge to ensure retiring panels avoid the landfill.
“Logistics is such a huge part of this — of the recycling process in general, for everybody,” Damaskos said. “The hauling is the hard thing to solve. You could make it work in your head, but unless you’re positioned across the street from a concrete company, the math doesn’t work.”
She pointed to weight limits, rail-to-truck transfer constraints and the economics of shipping heavy glass hundreds of miles as structural and cost barriers that policy can’t paper over.
“If you leave it up to legislation, you’re kind of at the capriciousness of whoever’s in office, as opposed to what’s the smart thing for the state,” she said. “I really think private industry can do it, but it has to be a private-public partnership — and it has to work in the way that the partner understands their customers.”
Instead, she points to community-scaled, flexible infrastructure built around how municipalities already operate.
New Jersey-based Commercial Solar Panel Recycling works with municipalities to set up “milk run” collection models: transfer stations accept panels at a flat rate, palletize them and a single truck circuits multiple sites for pickup when volumes are ready.
“If you tell people they have to recycle, you have to give them a way to do it,” she told RR. “What we try to do is work with municipalities and anybody that’s on the solid waste site and say, look, what is a program that works for your community.”
The infrastructure gap is becoming more urgent to close as New Jersey’s rulemaking process takes shape.
New Jersey’s S3399, which was signed by outgoing Governor Phil Murphy, is now under the jurisdiction of the NJ Department of Environmental Protection, which is expected to begin stakeholder conversations in mid-April.
The transition to a new governor and a newly appointed DEP head has added delays, but Damaskos sees the law’s structure as progress precisely because it sidesteps the manufacturer friction that has slowed Washington State’s EPR-based approach.
For 2026, she said the most immediate priorities are getting solid waste operators educated about what’s coming into their facilities and pushing states to reclassify solar panels from hazardous waste to universal waste, a designation that would remove a substantial regulatory barrier for both handlers and haulers.
“If you can’t make money at it, it’s never going to happen,” she said. “You have to figure out a moment where you can make some money, because that’s what’s going to make this work.”
