Overview
ARBOK does not dismantle panels. Panel recycling already exists — mechanical separation, delamination, leaching, flotation are all in service. What none of those plants have is an outlet for what they produce: a mixed aqueous stream that is buried, charged for, and fined.
ARBOK-PV closes that stream. Every recovery route the industry runs — acid leaching (nitric, methanesulphonic, deep eutectic solvents), flotation pre-concentration, electrowinning — ends with the metal in the water phase. Beneficiation changes the mass of the stream; it does not change the state the metal is in at the outlet. The plant is then left with a liquor carrying silver, copper, lead, thiophosphorus collectors and alumino-silicate slimes, and a disposal bill.
The technology takes that liquor apart: water back to circulation, metals concentrated separately from one another, ballast dry. The sludge stops being hazardous waste, the discharge charge stops being incurred, and the water loop moves from the cost column of the project into the revenue column.
> Core technology and architecture: see ARBOK-VC (Vacuum Cracking). Silver-specific market, resource and claims discipline: see ARBOK PV-Silver and ARBOK-Silver.
Applications
Scope rule: ARBOK-PV works with liquids only. Solids are not in scope. Dust is, because dust is taken into liquid at the point it arises and arrives as a stream.
Inputs (all liquid):
- leach liquors and barren solutions after electrowinning
- flotation process water and tailings water
- rinse waters across the recycling line
- combined site effluent
- leachate from panel landfill cells
- wet-captured cutting, milling and handling dust — scrubber water carrying the fines that would otherwise be an airborne hazard and a second dust source
Not in scope: water-treatment sludge and solid fractions. The plant does not hand us sludge — after ARBOK-PV there is none to hand, because the metals leave as concentrates and the residual leaves dry and inert.
Outputs: separated metal concentrates, one per metal, delivered to the operator's existing chemistry; clean water back to the process; dry inert ballast.
Metals in scope by module type: c-Si — silver, copper, lead, tin; CdTe — tellurium and cadmium (see ARBOK-Tellurium); CIGS — indium, gallium, selenium (see ARBOK-Indium, ARBOK-Germanium-Gallium, ARBOK-Selenium).
Industries and users: PV recycling plants (new build and retrofit), WEEE operators, module producers under EPR, urban-mining ventures.
Scale: container-class, 200 m³/day standard module, installed in parallel to match stream volume.
Operating Principle
Deep vacuum, ambient temperature — no heat is supplied, process temperature equals that of the incoming stream. The whole stream is treated without prior splitting into fractions. Separation runs through a phase transition, not through a barrier, so there is nothing to blind, foul or poison. Metals report to separate concentrates in a single pass rather than to one mixed cake requiring a second decomposition. Water returns to circulation; the residual leaves dry.
Why the standard schemes fail on this stream: reverse osmosis is blinded mechanically by alumino-silicate slimes and organically by thiophosphinates; reagent precipitation moves the metals into lead-bearing hazardous sludge and loses the water; ion exchange is poisoned because the collectors load onto the resin ahead of the target ion. All three treat the task as "bring it down to the discharge limit", so everything of value leaves in the sludge or the permeate.
Key Parameters
Platform base: deep vacuum ~1 kPa, ambient temperature; water return up to 100% by volume; ~0.72 kWh/m³ net; container module 200 m³/day = 73,000 m³/year; service life 15–20 years.
Separation: silver concentrates apart from the copper and lead of the same stream in a single pass.
No membranes, no reagents, no consumables — indifferent to incoming composition.
Carbon: classical water treatment on a comparable stream 200–400 t CO₂/year; ARBOK on grid power ~28 t, on solar zero. Treated-water quality confirmed by SGS testing.
Form factor: 20-ft container, mounted on asphalt or concrete in the open air.
Feed composition (from the published flotation work on end-of-life PV cells): copper 81.4% recovery into concentrate at 0.25 wt%; lead 20.9% recovery at 0.89 wt%; sulphydryl collectors at 150 g/t of feed, remaining in process water; nitrate background from the leach.
Module composition: 1 t of c-Si panels ≈ 760–770 kg glass, 80–100 kg aluminium, 30–50 kg silicon, ~90 kg polymers, ~10 kg copper, <1 kg silver. Silver, copper and silicon together carry about two-thirds of the module's material value while silver is 0.03–0.05 wt% (300–500 ppm).
Toxicants: lead <0.1 wt% (up to ~12 g in a 60-cell module, ribbon coating and solder paste); cadmium only in CdTe, <0.1 wt%, absorber film <3 µm. Neither is a revenue line — their removal is what stops the sludge being hazardous and returns the water clean.
Feed concentrations — design basis (2026-08-17). Superseded the earlier tiers carried from the parent silver case.
*Measured, from published leaching-test work on end-of-life modules:*
- Lead in leachate: up to 9.3 mg/L (TCLP, polycrystalline), 6.7 mg/L (pH-static), 1.4 mg/L (SPLP); amorphous modules 8.68 mg/L (TCLP) and 6.91 mg/L (WET). RCRA limit is 5 mg/L — the stream fails it by up to 1.9×.
- Copper: up to 145.32 mg/L released from multicrystalline silicon under agitation of diluted leachate.
- Regulatory thresholds that bound the discharge: lead 5 mg/L, silver 5 mg/L, cadmium 1 mg/L (RCRA TCLP).
*Derived from published process conditions — silver in the leach liquor follows arithmetically from grade and liquid-to-solid ratio:*
- Nitric-acid route at 5 g / 50 mL (L:S 1:10), 1–5 M HNO₃, 60–90 °C: whole module at 600 g/t Ag → ~60 mg/L; delaminated cells at 0.75 wt% Ag → ~750 mg/L.
- Ethaline DES route at L:S 1:500, 75–100 °C: whole module → ~1.2 mg/L; delaminated cells → ~15 mg/L.
So the real span across routes is roughly 1 mg/L to 750 mg/L, and it is set by the flowsheet, not by the panel. The acid route is an order of magnitude richer than the tier previously assumed; the DES route is dilute and its value is in the displaced treatment, not the metal.
Consequence for ARBOK-PV: the module is sized by volume, not by grade — cost per m³ is independent of concentration — but the finishing stage must be configured per route. Still missing: a combined site effluent assay from an operating plant. Nobody publishes it; it has to be taken on site.
Architecture and Components
Vacuum separation train + dry ballast extraction + metal finishing per matrix (cementation, ion exchange or electrowinning). Installed on the effluent circuit of the recycling line, downstream of leaching, flotation and electrowinning. 20-ft container; parallel modules for volume. SCADA/PLC ready.
Advantages
Technical: indifferent to incoming composition — nothing for thiophosphinates to foul, nothing for slimes to blind, nothing for organics to poison; co-separates the metals instead of leaving one mixed concentrate that needs a second stage.
Economic: recycling a module costs $10–15 against $2–3 for landfill, and the whole viability argument is about closing that gap; the water loop becomes a processing stage that earns rather than a cost line. Cost per m³ independent of concentration.
Environmental: 100% water return, no lead discharge, no hazardous sludge, near-zero carbon on a site that markets itself as a renewable-energy recycler.
Regulatory: removes the discharge and disposal exposure that EPR and WEEE obligations are about to make expensive.
Integrations
Retrofits onto any existing recycling flowsheet regardless of the upstream route — mechanical, thermal, acid leaching, DES or flotation. Flotation pre-concentration is not a competitor but better feedstock: it cuts the mass going to leaching to 1.4–2.8% of feed, making the liquor 35–70 times smaller and correspondingly richer.
Related: ARBOK PV-Silver (silver sub-case) · ARBOK-VC (Vacuum Cracking) · ARBOK Critical-Materials Recovery · ARBOK-Silver · ARBOK-Tellurium · ARBOK-Indium
Deployment & Operation
Container placed on the effluent circuit; no capital outlay from the client under BOOM (build, own, operate, maintain) or payment per cubic metre treated. Continuous, automated. No consumables. Commissioning is set by the site stream assay, which determines the finishing configuration.
TRL
Platform TRL 9 — industrially validated on other effluent streams. PV-line application: no field reference yet, no measured PV-site stream. To be confirmed by Michael once a plant assay exists.
Market Potential
Feedstock scale (published forecasts, not ARBOK measurements). End-of-life PV waste reaches 297–402 million t by 2060; recycling it is valued at $529.1–935.5 billion of cumulative net benefit with up to 3.32 billion t CO₂-eq avoided. Near term the world reaches ~4 million t of scrap by 2030 — for scale, European countries collected about 50,000 t of modules in 2022.
Regional distribution: China 1.4 million t by 2030 and 112.8–160.5 million t by 2060, up to 39.9% of the world total, the wave arriving after 2040. India 600 kt by 2030 and 19 million t by 2050. EU under the WEEE directive with targets but no working technology at scale. USA has no federal landfill ban — the regime is set state by state, so the lowest-OPEX route wins.
Landfill tariffs already price the problem: EREF reports panel-specific fees of $40.94/t in Texas and $125/t in Oklahoma against $44.87/t for general waste in the same region; a hazardous-waste landfill runs about $5 per panel, roughly $250/t.
Structural point. Panel scrap travels badly — light, bulky, fragile, and hazardous enough to attract a special transport regime. It will therefore be processed near where it arises, and the margin stays where the working line stands, not with whoever bought the panels.
Typical Project Economics
Reference: one module, 200 m³/day, 73,000 m³/year, silver at $2,040/kg ($63.5/oz mid-2026; spot 12 Aug 2026 $67.06/oz ≈ $2,156/kg).
- 1.2 mg/L (DES route on whole-module feed): 88 kg/yr = $0.18 M — here the displaced treatment pays, not the metal
- 15 mg/L (DES route on delaminated cells): 1.1 t = $2.2 M
- 60 mg/L (nitric-acid route, whole-module feed): 4.4 t = $8.9 M
- 750 mg/L (nitric-acid route, delaminated cells): 54.8 t = up to $112 M — assay-dependent, quote only against a site measurement
- Water 73,000 m³ at $1–15/m³: $0.1–1.1 M
- Discharge and sludge-handling charges no longer incurred: $0.05–0.5 M
Total on the 15 mg/L tier: $2.4–3.8 M per year from one unit. Payback 5–7 years.
Scale ladder (silver only, at 300–500 t Ag per million t of panels).
- 4 million t of scrap by 2030 → 1,200–2,000 t Ag → $2.4–4 billion
- 400 million t by 2060 → 120,000–200,000 t Ag → $245–410 billion
For orientation: world mine output is ~25,000 t Ag/year, and the market has run a deficit for six years accumulated to 215 million oz, about a quarter of annual mine supply. Every gram of the above passes through the water phase. Copper, tellurium, indium and gallium are additional to this and not counted in the ladder.
Risk Factors
No combined site effluent assay yet. Lead and copper figures are measured leaching-test values; silver figures are derived arithmetically from published grades and liquid-to-solid ratios, not sampled from an operating plant. The 750 mg/L acid-route case is the least certain and the most consequential. No PV field reference. Metal price volatility. Finishing configuration per matrix. Declining silver loading per module compresses the silver share of the value over time. PV recycling plant economics are themselves marginal, so the client's own viability is a counterparty risk.
Related Technologies
ARBOK PV-Silver · ARBOK-Silver · ARBOK-VC (Vacuum Cracking) · ARBOK Critical-Materials Recovery · ARBOK-Tellurium · ARBOK-Indium · ARBOK-Germanium-Gallium · ARBOK-Selenium · ARBOK-Copper-Waters