Recycling solar panels is complicated. An electrical engineer explains why
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But for now, it's even hard to reclaim the glass in solar panels. Many layers are glued together and need to be separated before they can be melted down for reuse. And if the separation is not precise enough, the glass that is recovered won't be of high enough quality to use in making other solar panels or windows. It will be suitable only for lower-quality uses such as fill material in construction projects.
Other panels, usually older ones, may contain small amounts of toxic metals such as lead or cadmium. It can be difficult to tell whether toxic materials are present, though. Even experts have trouble, in part because current tests, such as the toxicity characteristic leaching procedure, can give inaccurate results. Therefore, many companies that own large numbers of solar panels just assume their panels are hazardous waste, which increases costs for both disposal and recycling. Clearer labels would help people know what a solar panel contains and how to handle it.
If someone wants to recycle a solar panel, and is willing to bear the cost, there aren't many places in the U.S. that are willing to do it and are equipped to be safe about it.
Making panels last longer—perhaps as long as 50 years—using more durable materials, weather-resistant components, real-time monitoring of panel performance and predictive maintenance to replace parts before they wear out would reduce waste significantly.
Building solar panels that are more easily disassembled into separate components made of different materials could also speed recycling. Components that fit together like Lego bricks—instead of using glue—or dissolvable sealants and adhesives could be parts of these designs.
Improved recycling methods could also help. Right now, panels are often simply ground up, mixing all of their components' materials together and requiring a complicated process to separate them out again for reuse. More advanced approaches can extract individual materials with high purity. For example, a process called salt etching can recover over 99% of silver and 98% of silicon, at purity levels that are appropriate for high-end reuse, potentially even in new solar panels, without using toxic acids. That method can also recover significant quantities of copper and lead for use in new products.
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Increasing the practice of recycling solar panels has more than just environmental benefits.
Over the long term, recovering and reusing valuable materials may prove more cost-effective than continually buying new raw materials on the open market. That could lower costs for future solar panel installations. If they are fully reused, the value of these recoverable materials could reach over $15 billion globally by 2050.
In addition, recycling panels and components reduces American reliance on materials imported from overseas, making solar power projects less vulnerable to global disruptions.
Recycling also keeps toxic materials out of landfills. That can help ensure a shift to clean energy doesn't create new or bigger environmental problems. Also, recycling solar panels emits far less carbon dioxide than manufacturing panels from raw materials.
There are already some efforts underway to boost solar panel recycling. The Solar Energy Industries Association trade group is working to collect and share information about companies that recycle solar panels.
Governments can provide tax breaks or other financial incentives for using recycled materials, or ban disposing of solar panels in landfills. California, Washington, New Jersey and North Carolina have enacted laws or are studying ways to manage solar panel waste, with some even requiring recycling or reuse.
These efforts are important steps toward addressing the growing need for solar panel recycling and promoting a more sustainable solar industry.
Anurag Srivastava is a professor of computer science and electrical engineering at West Virginia University.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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