To save solar panels from landfills, startup is smashing them instead

(Bloomberg) -- Inside a noisy industrial plant on the outskirts of Yuma, Arizona, there's a machine that smashes old solar panels into bits. It can handle 10 panels a minute, as many as 7,500 a day, extracting bits of copper and silver and aluminum, and pulverizing most of the rest into a gritty powder.

It's the biggest US site for recycling old photovoltaic…