Photo courtesy of Comstock Metals LLC
Comstock Inc., headquartered in Virginia City, Nevada, has announced that, immediately following its public equity offering Aug. 15, it placed all purchase orders and paid deposits totaling $5.1 million for the equipment for Comstock Metals LLC’s 100,000-ton-per-year solar panel recycling facility in Silver Springs, Nevada. The total purchase price for all the equipment is approximately $10.5 million, and the company says it plans to spend an additional $1.5 million for expanded storage capacity, utility upgrades and commissioning of the facility.
Comstock Metals commissioned its 5,000-ton (200,000-panel-per-year equivalent) commercial demonstration facility in Silver Springs, Nevada, in January 2024. That site uses the company’s proprietary delamination technology. Its process involves primary size reduction before the material enters the delamination reactors. That is followed by a second size reduction process, mechanical screening and separation and bagging.
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Comstock Metals President Fortunato Villamagna told Recycling Today in an earlier interview that the plastics used in the photovoltaic panels are fully decomposed to carbon dioxide and water vapor in Comstock Metals' process. Eliminating those plastic layers frees the other components, and the secondary particle size reduction process enables them to fall apart from one another.
“The aluminum comes out clean. The glass comes out clean," Villamagna says.
“Our equity offering represented a remarkably broad and deep representation of some of the best institutional investors with proceeds dedicated to funding the capital expenditures for our first industry-scale facility, the operating expenses required to reach sustained profitability and the extinguishment of debt and other obligations,” says Corrado De Gasperis, executive chairman and CEO of Comstock Inc. “Our balance sheet has never been stronger as we are now rapidly deploying our industry-leading technology and customer solutions. The recycling growth opportunities have developed better and faster than our original plans, and we have now attracted some of the most sophisticated partners for investment, feedstock, operations and offtake.”
“For the remainder of 2025, we plan on accelerating and increasing our lead as our solar panel recycling systems rapidly expand market share nationally while we await our final permits and the delivery of our high-speed, continuous processing system,” Villamagna says. “With our system, every component of an end-of-life solar panel (glass, aluminum, semiconductor fines and other metals) is fully and cleanly reclaimed and repurposed into new, salable raw materials.”
Comstock Metals, a subsidiary of Comstock Inc., submitted permits for its first industrial-scale photovoltaic recycling facility in November of last year.
The company says its billable revenues are expected to be eight times greater in 2025 relative to 2024, or more than $3.5 million, with proportionate future increases in 2026 as the commercial-scale facility is scaled up.
The company has outlined its primary objectives for the next 10 months:
- expand and activate local county storage capacity adjacent to our first industry-scale facility;
- complete permitting for the industrial-scale facility in Silver Springs by November 2025;
- secure additional master service agreements (MSAs) with national and regional customers;
- complete site selection and permit submissions for two additional solar panel recycling locations;
- expand globally with strategic and/or international partners;
- procure, deploy and assemble the plant and equipment for the Silver Springs industrial-scale in the fourth quarter;
- commission the industrial-scale facility in the first quarter of 2026;
- continuously operate that facility during the second quarter of next year; and
- advance and expand r&d efforts to recover more and higher-purity materials from recycled streams for offtake.