An Italian research team has developed a high-value upcycling method for waste silicon. They successfully extracted silicon from retired photovoltaic modules and prepared it as a support material, then loaded it with palladium nanoparticles to produce a high-performance palladium/silicon catalyst. This catalyst can be efficiently applied to the synthesis of biaryl compounds that are central to the pharmaceutical and agrochemical industries, opening up a new high-value pathway for the resource utilization of photovoltaic solid waste.

Conventional processes in the industry can only recover metallurgical-grade silicon from retired photovoltaic modules, which is mainly used in low-end material applications. In contrast, the team innovatively converted silicon derived from this type of electronic waste into a catalyst support. The resulting palladium/silicon heterogeneous catalyst can reliably drive microwave-assisted Suzuki–Miyaura cross-coupling reactions, enabling the precise synthesis of core biaryl skeletons found in a range of high-end chemicals, including tepotinib, flutolanil, and sartans. This fully unlocks the application value of waste silicon from discarded photovoltaic modules.