About Phoenix
We are team Phoenix! As a mythology, Phoenix cyclically regenerates or is otherwise born again. Our business generates extra value from waste solar panels by recycling high-purity silver. Solar panels have 25-year lifetime. The quantity of waste solar panels is expected to grow exponentially with rapid deployment of renewable energy around the world. Solar panel contains less than 0.5% silver by weight, which bonds firmly on silicon surface to make the electrical contact. As such, conventional method would not be able to extract silver from solar panels.
Our technological solution is reverse electroplating using renewable energy. It is fast, circular and efficient. Electroplating is a commonly used industrial process to deposit a thin metallic layer on a solid substrate through reduction of cations of that metal in the electrolyte, driven by external current. The reversed process can be used for recycling. With the progress in R&D, our prototype can recycle up to 95% silver from waste solar panels within 6 minutes with 0.8 kWh/panel electricity consumption and zero chemical waste disposal. The recovered silver purity exceeds 99%. The cost is approximately $1/panel. We submitted provisional patent application to UNSW knowledge exchange (UNSW REF 2019-025).
Our core B2B business model is to license the silver recycling technology to existing solar panel recycling companies, which help them gain extra 47% value by recycling silver. To differentiate from competitors, we provide a B2C platform to engage more solar panels owners to recycle rather than landfill. Our strategy is to provide a memorial as a symbol of “saving the earth” using our reverse electroplating technology to encourage more recycling activities.
