Recycling

Australian researchers have developed a new separation technique that employs the same crushing and flotation principles used in mineral processing to recover more than 97% of silver from end-of-life solar panels.

India’s Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH) has released draft guidelines for the implementation of a Battery Pack Aadhaar system—an indigenous digital identification and data storage mechanism designed to ensure end-to-end lifecycle traceability of batteries, particularly those used in electric vehicles (EVs).

Once the new plants are commissioned, Attero’s overall processing capacity across e-waste and metals recovery will reach 244,000 tonnes per annum.

Jakson Engineers Ltd will set up a high-tech solar PV module recycling plant capable of recycling around 5,00,000 PV modules, or approximately 13,500 tonnes of modules per year, recovering critical materials and enabling responsible end-of-life solar management. The recycling line will be supplied by Ecoprogetti.

The promise of India’s circular economy lies in its ability to turn environmental challenges into engines of growth. Achieving it will take investment, innovation, and clear ways to measure progress.

Recyclability has to be considered a core engineering constraint by the battery industry. Adhesives and composites use could be reduced along with designing packs with cell visibility and enabling cell level separation should be a thing of the future. Standardization, which has been avoided for competitiveness for now, must be implemented since that will actually reduce costs across the value chain in the long term.

Industry body India Energy Storage Alliance (IESA) has called for clearly defined roles and responsibilities under the Battery Waste Management Rules, the adoption of global standards, recycled content targets aligned with emerging battery chemistries and domestic manufacturing, and support for eco-design to enable easier recycling.

As India ramps up solar installations and EV deployments, the volume of end-of-life components will grow rapidly. If these are treated simply as waste, we create new environmental burdens and miss a chance to recover value. If, instead, they are viewed as sources of supply, they become part of the solution.

India’s Production-Linked Incentive (PLI) programme for cell manufacturing has attracted investment into gigafactories and electrode production, but local manufacturing can only succeed if it has access to steady, domestic mineral feedstock. Recovered materials from end-of-life batteries can supply a meaningful share of that requirement, provided there is strong collection infrastructure, organised supply aggregation, and investment in processing technologies.

The Japanese companies announced a partnership to advance the recycling of solar panel cover glass for application in architectural flat glass production.