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Solar Panels Are Starting to Die, Leaving Behind Toxic Trash:
Solar panels are an increasingly important source of renewable power that will play an essential role in fighting climate change. They are also complex pieces of technology that become big, bulky sheets of electronic waste at the end of their lives—and right now, most of the world doesn't have a plan for dealing with that.
But we'll need to develop one soon, because the solar e-waste glut is coming. By 2050, the International Renewable Energy Agency projects that up to 78 million metric tons of solar panels will have reached the end of their life, and that the world will be generating about 6 million metric tons of new solar e-waste annually. While the latter number is a small fraction of the total e-waste humanity produces each year, standard electronics recycling methods don't cut it for solar panels. Recovering the most valuable materials from one, including silver and silicon, requires bespoke recycling solutions. And if we fail to develop those solutions along with policies that support their widespread adoption, we already know what will happen.
"If we don't mandate recycling, many of the modules will go to landfill," said Arizona State University solar researcher Meng Tao, who recently authored a review paper on recycling silicon solar panels, which comprise 95 percent of the solar market.
[...] "We believe the big blind spot in the US for recycling is that the cost far exceeds the revenue," Meng said. "It's on the order of a 10-to-1 ratio."
If a solar panel's more valuable components—namely, the silicon and silver—could be separated and purified efficiently, that could improve that cost-to-revenue ratio. A small number of dedicated solar PV recyclers are trying to do this.
Some PV researchers want to do even better than that. In another recent review paper, a team led by National Renewable Energy Laboratory scientists calls for the development of new recycling processes in which all metals and minerals are recovered at high purity, with the goal of making recycling as economically viable and as environmentally beneficial as possible.
[...] In addition to developing better recycling methods, the solar industry should be thinking about how to repurpose panels whenever possible, since used solar panels are likely to fetch a higher price than the metals and minerals inside them (and since reuse generally requires less energy than recycling). As is the case with recycling, the EU is out in front on this: Through its Circular Business Models for the Solar Power Industry program, the European Commission is funding a range of demonstration projects showing how solar panels from rooftops and solar farms can be repurposed, including for powering ebike charging stations in Berlin and housing complexes in Belgium.
Journal Reference:
Meng Tao, Vasilis Fthenakis, Burcak Ebin, et al. Major challenges and opportunities in silicon solar module recycling, Progress in Photovoltaics: Research and Applications (DOI: 10.1002/pip.3316)
(Score: 3, Informative) by datapharmer on Wednesday August 26 2020, @05:11PM (6 children)
Veolia already has pv recycling plants in Europe (where it was more popular earlier) and other companies are doing this too. I'm sure these huge companies will have them built in the U.S. within 30 years if this becomes an actual problem, but saying that something handled by a major international company on a large scale is "bespoke" means by Big Mac must be pretty "bespoke" too.
Darn kids and their bespoke and artisan everything - get off my lawn!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @06:36PM
Many times I see businesses advertising "artesian" widgets instead.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday August 26 2020, @08:41PM (2 children)
Why do they need to build them in the US? Solar isn't very popular here compared to Europe, which invests far more heavily in it. So why not just ship the old panels over there for recycling? It's probably a lot cheaper than building new plants here. Eventually it'll probably make sense to build a recycling plant here, but that may be a while since we were such laggards in adopting it, and it'll be a while before all the panels installed recently need to be junked.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @10:55PM
It's more energy efficient to recycle them here if there's enough of them to recycle. And there will be enough of them to recycle eventually. It's more a question of when than if.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 27 2020, @09:25AM
It may make sense to dump tons of separated PV panel waste in designated and specially prepared and marked landfills sorted by type/category. Future generations could use advanced mining and recycling tech on those "huge high yield deposits".
Same goes for other stuff. Process and sort them wisely, then bury them if you can't viably recycle them immediately. Locate the landfills in spots where there will be less environmental damage if they are turned into mines.
For perspective: Minimum viable gold ore - 0.5 parts per million (ppm). High grade mine = 44 grams per ton = 48 ppm. Gold in electronic waste - 80 ppm.
So why aren't we mining landfills for gold? Probably because we normally don't have enough electronic waste in one area to start a gold mine. And the environmental impact etc.
If the mining+recycling tech improves and/or mining costs increase, the minimum economically viable size should reach real world landfill sizes.
The environmental zealots will scream blasphemy of course... ;)
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday August 26 2020, @10:44PM
A note about "popularity". Enterprises in the EU adopted the tech early on - including governments at all levels. The tech was pushed, early on. Those enterprises and concerns in the EU contracted all of the manufacturing capacity in both the EU and the US to produce at capacity. In effect, all of the potential supply of panels was bought up by European governments and contractors, before very many people in the US even thought about it. Meanwhile, the US governments, at all levels, were pushing dino juice, and neglecting solar.
Left to their own devices, I think that individual people on both continents would probably have adopted solar at about the same pace. Governmental intervention gave people in the EU incentive to adopt the newer technology.
At the personal level, solar just wasn't an option in the US until recently, and it's still overpriced.
(Score: 2) by corey on Thursday August 27 2020, @10:29PM
I'll keep saying it. But like Annie Leonard said in The Story Of Stuff, we need regulation to close the loop by manufacturers. The currently externalised cost of disposal and recycling should be borne by the manufacturers. That will then solve the issue but also incentivise them to develop more eco friendly or more easily recyclable products. I believe this has happened in Scandinavia?
Yeah the price of goods will go up. But you then won't have Chinese factories ripping rare earths out of the ground to make quick and dirty solar cells at $0.50 each to get them out of the door and who cares about the cleanup. Imagine if they had to recycle them as well?
Though I would if I was government, probably subsidise solar cells because we bloody need them affordable so they get up on people's roofs to reduce coal burning.