NJ Solar Panel Recycling Rules Head to Legal Review

Only one of the six New Jersey facilities cleared to accept solar panels at the end of their working life is actually recycling them, Resource Recycling reported, citing Diane Gard, who heads the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection’s Bureau of Recycling and Hazardous Waste Management. That shortfall is influencing how the state puts its mandatory solar panel recycling law into practice.

Gard spoke Oct. 26 in New Orleans at E-Scrap Conference 2026, on a panel led by Scott Cassel, the founder and CEO of the Product Stewardship Institute (PSI). Her remarks explain why New Jersey still lacks permitted solar panel recyclers of its own, even though the law known as S3399 was signed in January.

Why the NJ solar panel recycling rules are delayed

S3399, which then-Gov. Phil Murphy signed on Jan. 12, makes the owner, producer, distributor or manufacturer of solar equipment responsible for taking it down once it leaves service and then recycling or refurbishing it. Before NJDEP can start rulemaking aimed specifically at solar, the law requires the department to assess whether recycling facilities in New Jersey exist and can be reached, and to print its conclusions in the New Jersey Register. Gard said she is unsure whether the facilities now operating would satisfy that test.

NJDEP is wrapping up its internal review of proposed rule changes that would designate solar panels both as universal waste and as Class D recyclable material, Gard said. Legal review comes next, and after that the package would be released for public comment. Final adoption usually lands roughly a year after publication, she said, and a large number of comments could delay it further.

“For any new state regulators, you know how slow that can go,” Gard said during the panel.

In the meantime, the state has no permitted recyclers for solar panels, Gard said. Older panels that do not pass toxicity characteristic leaching procedure (TCLP) testing are either being sent to hazardous waste landfills or stored in warehouses until the universal waste designation takes hold, she said.

A stopgap system on a five-year clock

As a bridge, NJDEP set up a research, development and demonstration framework that lets Class D recycling facilities that are in good standing accept panels, limited to non-hazardous ones that have gone through TCLP testing. Authorizations last a year and may be renewed, but only for a maximum of five years or until the final rules take effect, if that happens sooner. NJDEP issued the first ones in 2024, and several facilities will soon reach their third year under them, Gard said.

Gard said Commercial Solar Panel Recycling (CSPR), based in Phillipsburg, is the lone site among the six that recycles. Four others function as transfer stations, sending their panels on to CSPR, while the sixth moves panels to a facility it runs in another state. Combined, the authorized sites took in 107 tons last year, she said.

The law is also silent on who covers the cost. Gard said S3399 was not drafted as an extended producer responsibility (EPR) measure but still allows for a producer responsibility model, and that EPR “is not off the table.” She said the department has not talked about funding.

New Jersey’s approach differs from other states

With S3399, New Jersey became the first state to enact a mandatory solar panel recycling law that lacks an EPR framework. Gard said regulators are taking Washington’s experience into account. That state passed the country’s first solar panel EPR law in 2017, and according to the Washington Department of Ecology, some manufacturers chose to stop selling panels there instead of complying. Gard said just one panel maker still sells in Washington. Lawmakers there postponed the program again in 2025, giving manufacturers until Jan. 31, 2031, to secure an Ecology-approved stewardship plan before they can sell in the state.

“We don’t want to slow that growth in New Jersey,” Gard said.

The nation’s only other solar EPR law is a local one in Niagara County, New York, adopted in 2021 with drafting assistance from PSI. Manufacturers that sell panels in the county have had to follow it since Aug. 1, 2022. Cassel said the legacy of Love Canal in the county spurred lawmakers there. North Carolina and Texas also regulate end-of-life panels without EPR. In North Carolina, a 2023 law, H600, will keep photovoltaic modules out of unlined landfills beginning Dec. 1, 2026. Texas requires renewable energy component recyclers to post financial assurance and to report their stockpiles each year to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, with the first reports due Jan. 15, 2027.

Gard, who sat on an Environmental Protection Agency workgroup that looked at whether to bring solar panels under the federal universal waste rule, said not to expect federal action soon. The federal government “moves very slowly,” she said, and the present climate continues to favor fossil fuels. Should federal rules ever pass, states could go further than them but could not fall short of them.

What’s driving panels to recyclers now

Sarah Damaskos, CSPR’s managing director, said a large share of what recyclers are receiving now consists of panels lost early, not ones that have aged past a 20- to 25-year warranty. Ownership disputes, abandoned systems, storm and forklift damage, and re-roofing all take panels out of service ahead of schedule, she said. The biggest of these is repowering: owners swap functioning panels for more efficient models because incentives let the change pay for itself in a couple of years. Damaskos said CSPR has received repowering inquiries involving anywhere from 150 to 700,000 panels.

Repowering does not ensure the panels can be resold. In one ongoing CSPR repowering project, a defective backsheet is making the panels hard to remarket, Damaskos said. Panels rated below about 300 watts are worth little on resale, although agricultural, off-grid and international buyers exist; those sales typically carry no warranty, and tariffs are moving global demand “week by week,” she said.

Citing Department of Energy figures, Damaskos said glass accounts for roughly 77% of a crystalline silicon panel’s weight, and crystalline panels hold about 97% of the market. Some companies that say they recycle panels simply strip the aluminum frames and throw away the glass, recovering only about 10% of a panel, she said. CSPR aims for 95% to 96%. The company sells its recovered glass as pavers, sandblasting media and an additive for epoxy, and it is working on a concrete additive, fiberglass and a foam aggregate. Damaskos said CSPR does not ship intact panels to Asia for critical mineral recovery, a practice she called largely unregulated.

Damaskos said regulation is not the main thing nudging owners to recycle; reputational risk is, and she likened it to the legacy of cathode ray tubes (CRTs).

“They’re more worried about somebody finding out that they could have recycled pretty easily and they didn’t,” Damaskos said.

How other states are handling disposal

Rules differ greatly from state to state, panelists said. Damaskos said Vermont treats residential panels thrown out by homeowners as household waste. In Michigan, the Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy added one question to its requests for proposals for grants that pay for solar installations: “What’s your end-of-life plan?” Matt Flechter, who works for the department as a recycling market development specialist, said that question by itself steered applicants to recyclers. Eric Flesch, who coordinates E-Cycle Wisconsin for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, said his state exempts certain panels from household hazardous waste rules if contractors take them straight to a landfill. Because the panels are heavy, he said, landfilling frequently costs less than recycling, even when grants help.

In New Jersey, Gard said, a utility swapping out solar panels on traffic signals found that every one of them failed TCLP testing, and they are bound for a hazardous waste landfill. The utility has asked NJDEP whether it can take off the aluminum frames beforehand to lower shipping weight and reclaim the metal, and the department is working with it to find a solution, she said.

Gard urged regulators drafting solar legislation to define terms broadly enough to capture chemistries and technologies yet to come, and to launch a functioning recycling program alongside any disposal ban.

“It has been said, no ban without a plan,” Gard said. “But we should all be thinking about adding landfill bans.”

Until final rules are adopted, the research, development and demonstration authorizations NJDEP has issued since 2024 remain the state’s stopgap for accepting panels taken out of service.

Featured photo: Quang Nguyen Vinh via Pexels .