Comstock Metals secures location for solar panel recycling facility

Comstock Metals, a subsidiary of Virginia City, Nevada-based Comstock Inc., has secured a long-term lease on a 100,000-square-foot facility at 600 Lake Avenue, Silver Springs, Nevada, on the same campus as its currently operating demonstration facility. That facility has technologies for crushing, conditioning, extracting and recycling metal and mineral concentrates from photovoltaics and other electronic devices.

Last December, the company announced it had secured sufficient supplier commitments to begin commissioning its first photovoltaic recycling facility once it had received the permits. The company received conditional approval from the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection-Bureau of Sustainable Materials Management (NDEP-BSMM) earlier this year.

The facility will be able to process up to 100,000 tons per year of end-of-life solar panels, according to the company, which recently received unanimous approval for a conditional use permit (CUP) from the Lyon County Board of County Commissioners in Nevada for the operations and storage of solar panels at the facility. Comstock adds that this will be the first-of-its-kind regional solar panel recycling operation.

The facility’s storage capacity enables managing and processing large quantities of end-of-life solar panels and delivers a 100 percent closed-loop, zero-landfill solution, the company says.

"Our demonstration facility has already moved to two operating shifts, and we are adding the third shift during the third quarter,” Comstock Metals President Fortunato Villamagna says. “We are now progressing the full design and remaining permitting of our first industry-scale facility, having already fully secured the site lease and the county permit, and even commenced the preengineering and state permit drafting processes, so we can submit the rest of our permits. All these objectives are either on or ahead of schedule with our 2024 plans and objectives.”

The Silver Springs facility is strategically located to serve the solar industry in the western United States, according to the company.

"Once we demonstrated our ability to recycle and reuse 100 percent of the recycled materials, we accelerated the permitting for the expansion, both for storage and industry-scale operations and the team has now locked up the site for its first major expansion," Comstock Inc. Executive Chair and CEO Corrado De Gasperis says.

He adds that the team is engaged with customers for high-volume, longer-term commitments, which the company can “readily accommodate with our leased, industry-scale facility and already permitted and available expanded storage capability.”