SolarWorld AG has established a new Joint Venture for the production of metal products and other valuable materials that are made from recycled solar modules. The partners in this newly founded company in addition to SolarWorld AG itself are also the Preiss-Daimler Chemical Park as well as other companies. SolarWorld AG holds a 24 percent stake in SolarCycle GmbH. Headquarters of the company will be located in the Bitterfeld/Wolfen Chemical Park in Sachsen-Anhalt.
„Together with our competent partners we are building a company that will make an active contribution to preserving resources and generating valuable raw materials from secondary sources in Germany. In addition to our own long years of experience in module recycling the experience of our Joint Venture partners in treating compound materials and chemically separating valuable metals and other materials will be injected into the project”, says Dr.-Ing. E. h. Frank Asbeck, Chairman and CEO of SolarWorld AG.
At the Bitterfeld/Wolfen location the construction of the new, largely automated plant will begin in the fall of this year. The total investment for the venture will amount to € 12.7 million and will be implemented in two stages. “In the past four years the Freiberg recycling team, while operating the pilot plant in Freiberg, has been puzzling over the concept for a second generation module recycling plant. We are therefore particularly delighted that we can now employ this technology even more universally for the generation of metals from secondary sources and for the treatment of compound materials.
The separation techniques necessary to achieve high purity levels and the best possible yields will proceed largely automatically. This technology will make it possible to process up to 30,000 tons of recycling material per year in the future and to convert it into numerous new products”, explains Dr. Karsten Warmbach, Managing Director of Sunicon GmbH.
The completion of the first construction phase of the plant is scheduled for the end of 2012. In the new plant it will be possible to process not only crystalline solar modules but also other solar module types and compound materials.