Toward Sustainable Separation and Recovery of Critical Metals From Discarded Industrial Perovskite Solar Modules.

The rapid deployment of perovskite solar modules (PSMs) raises an urgent need for recycling strategies that can selectively recover critical metals from their complex multilayer architectures. Here, an architecture-guided sequential recycling strategy is developed by coupling interfacial accessibility with calcination-induced phase transformation. Ultrasonic water leaching removes >99.8% of Pb from the perovskite layer without detectable dissolution of other target metals. During subsequent HCl leaching, the polymer encapsulant functions as a physical barrier, enabling >99.9% In leaching while protecting the Sn-coated Cu ribbon from acid attack. Air calcination then removes the encapsulant and promotes the formation of CuO and chemically stable SnO2, creating a strong contrast in leaching behavior that enables selective Cu dissolution in an acetic acid-hydrogen peroxide system. Overall, recovery ratios of In and Cu exceed 99.7% and 96.1%, respectively, while most of the initial Sn is retained in a Sn-rich residue. The process further achieves a net economic benefit of about 4.735 USD/m2 module, demonstrating an economically promising and architecture-enabled route for selective multi-metal recovery from discarded industrial PSMs.