The global PV recycling market: volumes and, more importantly, timing

At the end of 2025 the cumulative installed PV capacity worldwide was approximately 2,973 GWp according to IEA-PVPS data cited in the Fraunhofer ISE Photovoltaics Report. IRENA's estimate in the same report is lower — around 2,392 GWp including off-grid systems — which is a useful reminder that even the headline number carries a range.

What is not in doubt is the growth. The report puts the compound annual growth rate of cumulative installations at about 27% between 2015 and 2025, with a pronounced shift in where that capacity sits: by 2025 China accounted for roughly 51% of the cumulative total, Europe for about 17% and North America for about 9%.

A module installed in 2008 reaches its design end of life around 2033; one installed in 2015 arrives around 2040. So the feedstock available to a recycler today reflects installations from the late 1990s and the 2000s, plus every module that failed early along the way.

This produces a persistent mismatch between national statistics and plant reality. A country can have enormous installed capacity and almost no feedstock, because most of it was installed in the last ten years. Another can have modest capacity and a busy recycling sector, because its early installations are now coming off roofs.

The practical inputs for sizing a plant are therefore local: the vintage of the installed base within economic transport distance, the observed replacement and damage rate, and the campaigns — repowering, decommissioning, replacement programmes — that are known to be scheduled.

• Regulation. Where modules are banned from landfill, or where producer responsibility applies, material moves. Where disposal remains cheap and legal, it often does not.
• Gate fees and disposal costs. The single strongest commercial driver. Recycling happens when the alternative costs more.
• Local outlets for glass and aluminium. A plant can only sell what its region can absorb. Glass with no local consumer is a cost, not a product.
• Transport economics. Modules are bulky and low-density. Collection radius is set by transport cost, not by ambition.
• Module composition over time. Higher power density per unit area and less silver per watt both change what a tonne of old modules is worth.
• Manufacturing location. Where modules are made, scrap is generated continuously and in a form that is far easier to process.

Three conclusions follow, and they are consistent with everything else on this site.

Size against the campaign, not the curve. Most plants built today are fed by damage, replacement and repowering long before they are fed by retirement. A plant designed for a future retirement curve will sit idle in the meantime.

Design for growth. The feedstock will grow substantially. Equipment that can be extended — an extra station, a second shift, a thermal stage added later — is worth more than equipment specified to one number.

Check the outlets before the machines. The binding constraint in most projects is not the availability of modules; it is whether glass, aluminium and the residual fraction can be sold or stored lawfully and profitably within reach.