Today's KNOWLEDGE Share:On solar panels: our latest mountain of waste

Today's KNOWLEDGE Share:

It is often the case with environmental problems that they are ignored until they are overwhelming us. And so it goes with solar panels, which will emerge as the pre-eminent waste issue du jour when the first generation of #pvpanels installed in the early 2000s reaches the end of its useful life around 2030.

Unlike wind turbines, which are made of homogenous and relatively easy to recycle materials, solar panels are a complex, multilayered fusion of glass, silicon and minerals such as silver and copper. The International Energy Agency predicted in a 2016 report that #australia will generate 145,000 tonnes of PV panel waste by 2030, although this figure is now almost certainly higher given the exponential popularity of utility scale solar installations since then.

Put in a more visually appealing way, if the disused solar panels were stacked on top of each other, they would look like 241 Mount Everests. And that’s just the waste coming from Australia, which makes up only a fraction of the global solar market.

Predictably, very little has been done to foster a circular PV panel economy until recently because the 2030 crunch point seemed so far away. But experts say Australia has a lot of catching up to do before it will have the capacity to adequately recover the contents of the PV panels that will need to be recycled in coming years.

What’s being done about it?

There have been encouraging signs from state and federal governments. New South Wales last year handed out $10 million in grants from the Circular Solar program to spur investment in recycling technologies, and the federal government is gradually developing a product stewardship scheme with industry partners that will include R&D and funds to support a domestic PV recycling industry.

Can’t we R&D our way out of this?

On first glance, chemical recycling techniques sound like a magic bullet solution because they can extract critical minerals from the panels. In France a facility called ROSI, which will open at the end of June, claims to be able to extract 99 per cent of a panel’s material, including the silver. However, chemical recycling techniques have largely not been commercialised because they are expensive and involve large amounts of energy. And they are not environmentally friendly. 

“Chemical recycling is not an easy process because you are left with toxic by-products and waste. We need to think about downstream impact of chemical processing and devise a circular solution for the solar industry,” Petesic told The Fifth Estate.

Another difficulty with recycling is to ensure the various components of panels are not contaminated, so they can be reused to make new high-grade materials. For this reason, recycling processes that involve crushing panels and using electromagnets to recover the precious materials are viewed as inferior.

Source:thefifthestate.com.au

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#recycling #pvpanels #solar