Renovo — "Decentralized Photovoltaic Waste Recovery Technology"

Renovo is developing decentralized, plug-and-play recycling units that address a structural gap in the clean energy transition: solar power has scaled globally, but the infrastructure to manage its end-of-life waste has not kept pace. By 2030, Europe alone is projected to face 8 million tons of photovoltaic waste, with an estimated €30B in recoverable materials at risk of being lost to landfill or low-value shredding under today's centralized, high-CapEx recycling model, which produces contaminated cullet and suffers from low recovery rates on valuable metals like silicon, silver, and copper. Renovo's modular, transportable units instead offer a fully electric, chemical-free process rated at 1,000 tonnes/year capacity and a 90% material recovery rate, extracting high-purity glass, aluminum, copper, silicon, and recyclable thermoplastics (EVA, Tedlar) on-site rather than through centralized transport and processing.

The company is targeting a €7B TAM narrowing to a €177M SAM and an €8–15M SOM by 2030, selling into waste management and recycling operators, materials and metals recovery players, renewable energy operators, and photovoltaic manufacturers under a "Recycling as a Service" model, supplemented by direct revenue from selling recovered materials as upcycled inventory. The go-to-market roadmap runs from pilot validation in Italy (2026) to commercial launch (2027), EU market entry (2028), US market entry (2029), and scale-up (2030), with Italy representing an estimated 10–15% of total EU photovoltaic waste flow (~21,500 tonnes in 2022) as the initial addressable base.