“If we want solar to be truly scalable technology, circularity can’t be optional. It has to be part of the infrastructure.”
We spent years scaling solar energy as quickly as possible. The focus was installation, adoption, and growth. Much less attention went toward what happens when millions of those panels eventually stop working.
In episode 154 of Women Disrupting Tech, I sit down with Andjela Bozinac, co-founder and COO of Renovo Recycling. As a mechanical engineer, she spotted a contradiction she couldn’t ignore: solar energy is scaling fast globally, but the industry has no good answer for what happens to panels at the end of their life. Millions of them will be coming off rooftops in the 2030s, and the current options are either landfill or chemical recycling processes that are expensive, energy-intensive, and destroy much of the material value in the process.
Renovo’s answer is a modular, chemical-free deconstruction system that uses Physical AI and robotics to separate each layer of a solar panel precisely, recovering aluminum, silicon, glass, and plastics at high purity. But what makes this conversation stand out is not just the technology. It is how Andjela thinks about building. From day one, she has been asking three questions in parallel: can we build this, can we defend it, and can it actually be adopted in the real world?
That last question turns out to be the hardest one.
Hit play below to listen to the full conversation. Or keep reading for practical takeaways, highlights, and trends from the episode.
Practical Takeaways for Founders
Before founding Renovo, Andjela co-founded TreeBlock, a SaaS platform for ESG compliance reporting. Her primary learning from that experience was a fundamental shift in focus: from simply building the solution to building the right path to adoption. She realized that even a technically sound product will struggle if it is not introduced to the market correctly.
End-of-Life as a Design Requirement
True sustainability requires understanding the entire lifecycle of a product, from creation to management once it becomes waste. For physical products in particular, invention is only the first half of the job. The second half is being able to repair, maintain, and eventually decommission the product effectively.
Solar panels are a clear example. They are designed and installed with care, but the question of what happens at the end of their operational life is rarely part of the original design thinking. Andjela argues that for solar to be truly sustainable, circularity cannot be optional. It has to be built into the infrastructure from the start.
The 30/70 Rule of Adoption
Technical success is only 30% of the journey. The remaining 70% is engineering a path to adoption, which means ensuring the solution fits into existing logistics, workflows, and regulatory frameworks.
Andjela defines adoption as how easily a product fits into the real, existing world. Not an ideal version of it. This is a shift that many deep tech and climate tech founders find difficult, because it requires moving attention away from the innovation itself and toward the system around it. Who uses it? How does it get deployed? How does it integrate with what already exists?
Regulation Is the Market
In climate tech, regulation is often seen as a barrier. Andjela sees it differently: it is a market driver. Manufacturers are already required by law to manage the end-of-life of their products and provide traceability across the supply chain. Aligning with those requirements early does not slow Renovo down. It turns the product into a tool for compliance and accelerates the path to paying customers.
Taken together, these three takeaways point at the same thing: building something that works in the real world requires thinking beyond the product itself, toward the system it needs to fit into.
If you know a founder building in deep tech or climate tech, share this episode with them using the buttons below.
Or scroll down for magic moments.
Highlights and timestamps
| Time | Highlight |
|---|---|
| 00:00 | Introduction |
| 03:00 | Introduction to Renovo Recycling and Founder’s Journey |
| 06:02 | Engineering Background and Its Impact on Entrepreneurship |
| 08:40 | Lessons from Previous Ventures: TrueBlock Experience |
| 11:38 | The Problem of Solar Panel Waste and Recycling Challenges |
| 14:38 | Identifying the Core Issues in Solar Panel Recycling |
| 17:34 | Innovative Solutions for Solar Panel Deconstruction |
| 20:20 | Modular Systems and Their Advantages in Recycling |
| 21:19 | Targeting Solar Installers: A Strategic Approach |
| 23:51 | Current Status and Future Plans for Renovo Recycling |
| 24:02 | The Role of AI in Physical Recycling |
| 27:18 | Preparing for the Solar Waste Surge |
| 30:23 | Fundraising in Deeptech |
| 34:50 | Convincing Stakeholders of Urgency |
| 37:38 | Regulatory Support and Compliance |
| 39:04 | Expanding Beyond Solar Panels |
| 40:58 | Practical Insights for Founders |
| 45:30 | Empowering Women in Tech |
| 49:37 | Building a Supportive Funding Ecosystem |
3 Magic Moments In The Episode
One thing I appreciated in this episode is how Andjela explains highly technical ideas in ways that immediately make sense. It comes from a deep passion for what she is building and for a martial art that taught her a lot about life and business. From her story, three moments deserve your attention.
The Reverse Vending Machine
One of the clearest moments in the episode is when Andjela explains what Renovo’s technology actually does. Most recycling processes treat solar panels like any other waste: they crush them, which mixes all the materials together and destroys much of their value. Renovo does the opposite.
She describes it as a vending machine in reverse. You put a panel in, and instead of mixing the outputs, you get each component back separately: glass, aluminum, silicon cells, and plastics, each at high purity. The robot works layer by layer, using sensors and vision to identify the panel and execute precise mechanical separation.
What makes this moment land is the simplicity of the image, followed by a line that reframes the entire philosophy behind the technology: “We don’t break the panel, we unlock it.”
The Diamond of Pressure
Early in the conversation, Dirkjan asks Andjela about her black belt in Taekwondo and whether it has shaped how she operates as a founder. Her answer is one of the most quotable moments on the podcast in a while.
In martial arts, you lose constantly. But over time, losing stops feeling like defeat and starts feeling like information. You ask what to adjust and you keep moving. That mindset, she says, is what carries you through the periods in a startup when motivation disappears and nothing seems to be working.
“Pressure either turns you into dust or into diamond.”
Deep tech is full of systems that break, pilots that move slowly, and validation cycles that take longer than expected. Discipline matters more than short bursts of motivation.
Engineering for Delayed Certainty
Perhaps the most powerful moment in the episode is when Andjela reframes the entire urgency argument around solar waste.
Most people hear “millions of panels reaching end of life in the coming years” and mentally file it under future problems. Andjela flips that framing entirely. Solar panels have a lifespan of 25 to 30 years. The panels installed during the boom of the early 2000s are already coming off rooftops. This is not a bet on a future market. It is preparation for something that is already in motion.
“It is not a hypothetical problem. It is delayed certainty.”
That distinction matters for how Renovo sells, how it fundraises, and how it thinks about building infrastructure now rather than waiting for the wave to hit.
What was your favorite moment from the episode? Let me know in the comments!
The Quote from the Episode
“It’s about being in a position to shape a little bit of the future, instead of just adapting to it.” — Andjela Bozinac
This comes from the part of the conversation where Andjela talks about why she wants to see more women enter AI and robotics. But it is bigger than a career advice moment.
Andjela’s point is about timing. Right now, the infrastructure, systems, and norms around AI and robotics are still being defined. The decisions being made today about how these technologies work, who they serve, and what values they embed will shape the next 20 years. People who are in the room while those decisions are being made have a different kind of influence than those who arrive later.
For women in particular, she sees this as a rare window. Not just to participate in tech, but to help determine what it looks like.
3 Trends I’m Seeing Across Conversations
The more conversations I have on Women Disrupting Tech, the more I notice that some of the biggest challenges in building technology companies are not about the technology itself. They are about the systems, behaviors, and structures that surround it.
There is no such thing as a ‘Stupid Question’
In this episode, we go deep on how Renovo’s product actually works: Physical AI layered on top of industrial robotics. That is not my area of expertise, and at times I felt it during the conversation. But not knowing forced me to ask basic questions that turned out to be some of the most useful ones.
That connects directly to what Izzy Sayers shared in episode 152. Izzy built her entire career around asking questions others were afraid to ask, and she argues there should be no shame in that. Whether you are a KPMG advisor or a podcast host talking to a deep tech founder, curiosity without pretense tends to open up conversations in ways that expertise sometimes closes them.
The Adoption Gap Shows Up Across Every Industry
Andjela’s 30/70 rule, that getting the technology to work is 30% of the journey and getting it adopted is the other 70%, is one of those frameworks that sounds obvious once you hear it and then turns up everywhere.
I heard the same thing from Carmen van Vilsteren in episode 151. In the medical world, clinical proof is not enough. You need key opinion leaders to use your product, believe in it, and advocate for it within their institutions before adoption actually happens. The industries are completely different. The dynamic is identical.
Product Market Fit Means Fitting Into the Real World
Andjela defines adoption in a way I have not heard framed quite like this before: it is about how easily you fit into existing infrastructure, workflows, and regulation. Not the ideal version of the world. The one that already exists.
That resonates with my own experience building Meds2go. Most of the product design decisions and most of the sales cycle came down to one question: does this fit into the daily lives of the people who are supposed to use it? Not whether it was technically better. Whether it fit. That is a different design problem, and it is one that most founders encounter later than they should.
Across deep tech, climate tech, healthcare, and consumer products, the pattern is the same: the hardest part of building is not the invention. It is the integration.
🗣️ Which of these trends feels most important to you? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
Coming Up On Women Disrupting Tech
FemTech has the potential to unlock a trillion-dollar opportunity. So why do all-female teams receive just 2% of early-stage venture capital?
In episode 155 of Women Disrupting Tech, I sit down with Beata Wandachowicz-Krason, who researched exactly that question for her Executive MBA thesis. We talk about the funding paradox in FemTech, the cultural taboos that suppress both patient voices and founder credibility, and what founders can do right now to build a pitch that moves FemTech out of the wellness niche and into the room where investment decisions are made.
In the clip below, Beata outlines three of the core barriers she identified in her research: the funding paradox, the fact that critical health data remains trapped on phones and never enters official medical records, and the normalization of suffering that has taught women to stay silent about chronic pain and discomfort. It is a sharp two-minute summary of why the gap exists and why it persists.
Curious about the rest of the conversation? Use the subscribe button below to find it in your inbox on 4 June at 8:00 CET.
What I Want to Leave You With
I have solar panels on my roof. At some point, those panels will need to be replaced. Until I spoke with Andjela, I had not once thought about what happens to them after that.
That is the hidden waste problem. Not hidden because it is secret, but hidden because the timelines are long enough that most people do not feel the urgency yet. Andjela does. And she is trying to build the infrastructure before the pressure becomes impossible to ignore.
The bigger lesson for me is not just the technology. It is the way Andjela thinks about building. She asks three questions in parallel: Can we build this? Can we defend it? Can it be adopted? Most founders focus on the first question. The second and third are where Renovo is doing its most important work.
Listen to the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.
About Andjela Bozinac
Andjela Bozinac is the co-founder and COO of Renovo Recycling, a deep tech company building modular, chemical-free systems for end-of-life solar panel deconstruction. She holds a background in mechanical engineering and intellectual property, which shapes how Renovo approaches both product development and competitive strategy.
Before founding Renovo, Andjela co-founded TreeBlock, a SaaS platform for ESG compliance reporting. The experience taught her the difference between building a solution that works technically and one that enters the market in the right way — a lesson that now sits at the center of how Renovo operates.
Outside of work, Andjela holds a black belt in Taekwondo and continues to train actively. She credits the discipline and resilience of martial arts with helping her navigate the pressures of building a deep tech company.
You can connect with Andjela on LinkedIn.
About Renovo Recycling
Renovo Recycling is an Italian deep tech company developing modular systems for the mechanical deconstruction of end-of-life solar panels. Rather than relying on chemical processes that destroy material value, Renovo's technology separates each layer of a solar panel — glass, aluminum, silver, silicon, and plastics — to preserve material purity and enable high-value recovery.
The company targets solar installers as its primary entry point, deploying modular units close to where panels are removed and stored. This reduces transport costs, cuts carbon footprint, and integrates into existing logistics and certification systems rather than requiring a parallel infrastructure to be built from scratch.
Renovo is currently at Technology Readiness Level 5, bootstrapped to that stage over the course of one year, and is now raising €1.7 million through a SAFE mechanism to industrialize the technology and deploy its first five commercial units in 2027.
You can learn more on the Renovo Recycling website and watch the company pitch on YouTube.
Listen to Episode 154 on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube
How a Female Founder Is Fixing Solar Energy's Hidden Waste Problem with Andjela Bozinac | Ep. 154 - Women Disrupting Tech
Events that Women Disrupting Tech Must-Attend
Some great events take place this spring. Below are three that you definitely want to check out. For a full overview of all events, including links to buy tickets, please check the events page.
Featured Event: Understanding Women's Health - 24 June 2026
Learn how hormone cycles or perimenopause impact your life, and discover more about conditions like PCOS or Endometriosis at the quarterly Understanding Women's Health Events hosted by Kasia Pokrop.
Women's health is a topic near and dear to my heart. Which is why I'm happy to support and attend the events that 3mbrace Health organizes at Equals every quarter.
Men are expressly invited to join. In fact, send me an email if you want to be a women's health pioneer. More info and tickets can be found here.
Diverse Leaders in Tech Events
If you like being in the know about what is happening in the DEI space, Diverse Leaders in Tech is the place to be.
Every last Thursday of the month, they have monthly in-person meetups for tech people, HR leaders and supporters of diversity to exchange insights, tackle challenges, and take action. It's a vibrant, safe space where diversity is celebrated.
You can find their events on the website. Joining your first event is free.
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