Earlier quoted context omitted.
Recycling isn't free. Currently it costs 20-30x more to recycle a panel than to dump it in a landfill. Maybe the aluminum frame, the glass and polymer sheets, and the junction box containing the copper wiring are relatively straightforward to recycle, but it takes much more complicated (see: expensive) machines to get to the smaller parts like the intra-cell wiring and the silicon itself. And the silicon wafers aren'…
Okay, so we’ve moved on from: Panels can’t be recycled. To: Panels in the US aren’t recycled enough because the economic conditions aren’t right. Thats a much more nuanced point. Government regulation can help here for sure.
So no, it's not just solar panels in the US. The technology to make recycling solar panels feasible just doesn't currently exist