Solar Panel Recycling and End-of-Life Waste Statistics (2026)

What IRENA’s July 2026 Report Projects

IRENA published “End-of-life management for a circular economy: Solar PV panels” in July 2026. Global cumulative end-of-life photovoltaic waste is projected to exceed 12 million tonnes by 2035 and top 200 million tonnes by 2050, with annual waste surpassing 25 million tonnes a year by that point, equivalent to more than 400 gigawatts of retired capacity. Every figure is explicitly stated as being under IRENA’s 1.5°C Scenario, a specific deployment pathway assumption tied to a particular climate trajectory, not a neutral base-case projection.

IRENA’s own PDF loaded successfully this cycle but its content is image and graphics encoded, not machine-readable text, so nothing above comes from a direct read of IRENA’s own report. Every figure on this page is drawn from TaiyangNews, a solar trade press outlet that names the report and its findings directly, and is attributed that way throughout rather than presented as a first-hand IRENA citation.

A Waste Stream That Is Still Mostly Ahead of Us

Solar panel waste currently makes up under 1% of global e-waste by weight, a figure IRENA projects growing to more than 21% by 2050. That growth curve lines up with how young the installed fleet still is relative to a panel’s working life: per SolarReviews’ guide to solar panel warranties, the industry standard performance warranty guarantees roughly 85% to 87% of nameplate output at year 25, meaning most of the world’s currently installed solar capacity, concentrated in the last decade or so of rapid deployment, is not yet anywhere near the end of its rated life. The 2050 figures above describe a long-run curve building toward its steepest point, not a waste volume that has already arrived.

The Recovered-Material Value Behind the Waste

The same report puts a dollar figure on what that eventual waste stream is worth to recover: $810 million a year in recovered material value by 2030, growing to $6 billion a year by 2040, and more than $20 billion a year by 2050. Aluminum makes up roughly half of the projected 2050 material mix by weight, followed by silver at about a third, silicon at 11%, and copper at 7%. That composition is why the recovered-value curve rises so steeply even as the underlying tonnage grows more gradually: aluminum and silver carry real recovery value at scale, not just landfill volume.

A Global Projection, Not a US-Specific One

None of the figures above are US-specific. This research did not find a sourced, US-only breakout of solar panel waste tonnage or recovered-material value from IRENA’s report or any corroborating source checked this cycle. A figure describing US landfill volume specifically, distinct from the global totals IRENA publishes, remains genuinely unsourced as of this page. Anyone using this data in a domestic sales or policy conversation should present it as a worldwide projection, not translate it into an implied US-specific number.

The Numbers

Sources

The external data in this article draws on the sources below. Figures described in the text as estimates or industry triangulations are directional and are not attributed to a single dataset.

• TaiyangNews, coverage of IRENA’s July 2026 end-of-life solar PV report
• SolarReviews, guide to solar panel warranties, on the industry-standard 25-year performance warranty term

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