A scaling moment for solar recycling

French cleantech company Rosi has raised more than €20 million in a Series B funding round to expand its photovoltaic recycling business and build a new processing plant in Teruel, Spain. The company says the facility will be able to handle 10,000 tonnes of end-of-life solar modules per year, marking a notable step in Europe’s effort to build out circular infrastructure for renewable energy hardware.

The investment is significant not only because of the size of the round, but because it targets a part of the solar value chain that is becoming harder to ignore. As installations accumulate across Europe and elsewhere, the industry is beginning to face a parallel challenge: what to do with damaged, aging, or decommissioned panels at scale.

What Rosi says it can recover

Rosi’s pitch centers on material recovery. According to pv magazine, the company uses a pyrolysis-based process to extract high-purity materials from retired modules, including silver, silicon, copper, aluminium, and glass. Those are exactly the kinds of materials that make solar recycling economically and strategically attractive, provided they can be recovered cleanly enough and in sufficient volume.

High-purity recovery matters because simple shredding does not create the same downstream value. The closer a recycler can get to returning useful material streams back into industrial circulation, the stronger the case for a genuine solar circular economy.