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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, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @10:40PM (2 children)
The hazardous component claimed to be in solar panels is the lead in the solder, and RoHS has mean that this hasn't been used for a long time. So pretty low hazard
Then there is the thing that solar panels are not a consumable - they have one of the longer design lives of manufactured goods. So that means pretty low waste volume
Pretty low hazard at pretty low volume. As waste goes, not too bad, you could probably clad office blocks in the stuff, or grind it up and use it as cement aggregate. Compare this to say the fly ash of coal plants which is downright nasty with real radioactive isotopes, or even used car tyres, the dust of which goes everywhere...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by evilcam on Thursday August 27 2020, @03:00AM
Add to the fact that 20 years of panel waste is about the same as one year of waste from food packaging [europa.eu].
Solar is a good way to generate energy and I don't get why the Common Man™ keeps demanding more expensive alternatives [pri.org] that have the added downside of fucking up the environment...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 27 2020, @08:41AM
Ah yes, lead..this would be just one of the many 'fun' substances which contaminates the land adjacent to my house, the land my house sits on, the land that every place I've ever worked here in the UK sits on...
And then there's the interiors, lead based paints, banned back in the 60's, but were still being used in industry up to the 90's...every house I've lived in, every place I've worked here in the UK there has been lead based paint.
And then there's tetraethyl lead...now, how much lead has that stuff deposited in the environment over the 80 odd years It was being used as a fuel additive?
Oh, let's not forget water pipes, I've lived in at least one rented property that had lead water piping (from the mains to the house, then into a mostly copper pipe system) that's the one I definitely knew about, there were a couple of properties down in England that might have had some lead pipework lurking due to their age (it would have gone nicely with the lead based paintwork lurking under the layers of 'modern' paint).
As we're talking about waste electronic/electrical items...we've had about 50 years (locally, elsewhere YMMV) of people dumping/fly tipping old fscked TVs, stereos, etc etc in the local woods, however great a source of components they might have been for the impoverished spotty youth armed with a soldering iron that I once was, I dread to think what the lead levels are like in these spots, and that's just one of many locally, then multiply that nationally..
I'm not in any way trying to play down the concerns about the lead content of the solder used in these panels, and I'm not saying that they shouldn't attempt to minimise the release of any more of the stuff into the environment, but proportionally, the amount we're talking about is piddlingly small compared to the amount that's already there.
Oh, and I live in an area where, on top of all the lead we've deposited, there's a naturally higher level of lead in the environment at several locations, I've been sort of lucky there, my house isn't in one of them, the lead in my soil is contamination, but I do have the joys of natural trace levels of copper/arsenic and anything fun that leaches out of coal in the soil..
Heh, I think you mean 'and RoHS has mean that it shouldn't have been used for a long time', I've had newish items ( < 10 years old) in for repair where the solder melted far too easily, suspiciously easily, 60/40 easily...admitedly, it was the solder being used on several non-SMD components, but on several different items, different brands, all made in fair Cathay..