New OnePlanet exec sees opportunity in Southeast’s growing solar panel waste stream (Courtesy of the Jacksonville Business Journal) — With tremendous growth, comes waste.
After solar panels produce renewable energy for years, the infrastructure eventually goes out of use, and at Jacksonville-based start-up OnePlanet Solar Recycling the best way to prevent decommissioned panels from ending up in a landfill is to tear them apart.
Providing disposal for solar scrap on its own is big business, and the newly appointed Chief Commercial Officer for OnePlanet sees a unique model to seize on the solar leftovers from a rapidly growing Southeast market with plenty of infrastructure to throw away, leading to the collection of abundant raw materials to syphon off and bring back to the market.
OnePlanet CCO Nathan Arbitman said large solar asset owners such as NextEra Energy, Duke Energy and other independent power producers with large solar assets have expanded so rapidly into solar, that part of the boom is replacing old technology with what’s new.
Arbitman, who was appointed earlier this month carries extensive experience working at the intersection of advanced materials and energy storage. Though he started out working for companies supplying materials to manufacturers conceiving solar panels, he’s now at the other end of the life cycle working with materials deconstructed from the very same products.
“Typically, they’ll look at the investment and they’ll say, ‘wow, this solar part that I installed 12 years ago, it’s still working fine, but the technology has advanced so far that we’d be better off replacing those panels with new solar panels,” Arbitman said.
That’s where OnePlanet comes in to fill the gap, charging a fee to provide a waste disposal destination for defunct or aged panels with limited usability. The services are more attractive than secondary markets, which can add up to more costly shipping, the CCO said.
The company has located a facility in Green Cove Springs for a unique position in the supply chain, simultaneously consuming what would have been waste for a dumping ground and transforming it to material for distribution.
Ironically, ripping the solar generation infrastructure apart, extracting substantial amounts of glass, copper and silicon, creates more valuable commodities as companies seeking raw materials from the U.S. supply chain are inundated by tariffs.
“I think that’s also an important aspect of what we do especially during a time when commodity prices are, at or near historic highs, when the tariff environment is very dynamic,” Arbitman said. “We are essentially helping other American manufacturing companies with that dynamic by making more materials available in those various value chains.”
Though the volume is not necessarily enough at this point to move the needle on the price of copper, every little bit helps to keep solar panels out of landfills, he added.
Nevertheless, OnePlanet has big aspirations and deep pockets.
With CEO André Pujadas – a veteran of industrial-scale steel recycling at Nucor – at the helm, and a founding team drawn from companies including Goldman Sachs, 3M and PineGate Renewables, the company has the backing of a $7 million seed round earlier this year and a $14.5 million federal tax credit.
Eventually, the firm plans to establish a national network of facilities.
To start, Florida is key to building its network, Arbitman said.
“So, one thing that we see is that, as a solar leader in the U.S., Florida does have the opportunity to lead the nation in creating critical material supply chains, via recycled materials, and there are policy mechanisms that can be employed to help ensure that these critical materials that are in solar panels, actually get put into value chains and can create more jobs, lower costs and just have a beneficial impact on on the economy, let alone the the beneficial environmental impact,” the CCO said.
Additionally, OnePlanet can still distinguish itself among other players in the niche electronic waste recycling industry by narrowly tailoring its processes to solar waste.
“There’s a lot of companies, they started in general kind of e-waste handlers, and they’re like, ‘yeah, sure, we’ll take solar panels, and they’re running it through the same equipment, they’re kind of doing it on an ad hoc basis, but what we’ve done is design a kind of purpose-built asset that its sole purpose is to receive and process solar panels,” Arbitman said. “And we believe that will allow us to have, again, best in class, material recovery capabilities.”
Ultimately, the hyper focus on solar will culminate into the $90 million “River City Project,” which is set to be built in the Jacksonville area and have capacity for processing more than 2 million end-of-life solar modules annually by 2027.
By the first half of 2027, the plant will have 75 jobs, and once the plant is scaled up at full capacity it will create up to 125 jobs, Arbitman said.