Millions of Toxic Solar Panels That Can’t Be Recycled Destined for Landfills

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https://stopthesethings.com/2020/10/10/lingering-legacy-millions-of-toxic-solar-panels-that-cant-be-recycled-destined-for-landfills/

"Lingering Legacy: Millions of Toxic Solar Panels That Can’t Be Recycled Destined for Landfills



Around the globe, millions upon millions of solar panels have reached their use by dates; they can’t be recycled, which means they’re destined for the local dump.

Each panel is a veritable toxic cocktail of gallium arsenide, tellurium, silver, crystalline silicon, lead, cadmium and other heavy metals. As the stuff leeches into the water table, it’s not difficult to imagine the effect on water supplies, the environment and human health.

And it’s not just filling up landfill with toxic sludge – in the mother of all ironies – while they’re above ground, solar panels are sending the mercury northward, adding 3-4°C to the average temperature of the environment in which they are situated.[/b]

Well, it all seemed like such a good idea, at the time.

Duggan Flanakin deals with that and a number of other matters which tend to take the shine off solar power.

Solar panels generate mountains of waste – They also heat the planet, blanket wildlife habitats and cause other ecological damage
Watts Up With That?
Duggan Flanakin
19 September 2020

The problem of solar panel waste is now becoming evident. As environmental journalist Emily Folk admits in Renewable Energy Magazine, “when talking about renewable energy, the topic of waste does not often appear.” She attributes this to the supposed “pressures of climate change” and alleged “urgency to find alternative energy sources,” saying people may thus be hesitant to discuss “possible negative impacts of renewable energy.”

Ms. Folk admits that sustainability requires proper e-waste management. Yet she laments, “Solar presents a particular problem. There is growing evidence that broken panels release toxic pollutants … [and] increasing concern regarding what happens with these materials when they are no longer viable, especially since they are difficult to recycle.”

This is the likely reason that (except in Washington state), there are no U.S. mandates for solar recycling. A recent article in Grist reports that most used solar panels are shipped to developing countries that have little electricity and weak environmental protections, to be reused or landfilled.

The near-total absence of end-of-life procedures for solar panels is likely a byproduct of the belief (and repeated, unsupported assertion) that renewable energy is “clean” and “green.” Indeed, Mississippi Sierra Club state director Louie Miller recently claimed that unlike fossil fuels and nuclear energy, “Sunshine is a free fuel.” Well, sunshine is certainly free and clean. However, there is a monumental caveat.

Harnessing sunshine (and wind) to serve humanity is not free – or clean, green, renewable or sustainable.

The 1977 Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act mandates that new surface coal mines include plans and set aside funds for full reclamation of mine properties. The law also sets standards for restoring abandoned mine lands. There is nothing akin to this for solar facilities and wastes.

Similarly, the 1980 Superfund law (Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act) created a tax and trust fund to pay for preventing and fixing actual or threatened releases of hazardous substances that could endanger public health or the environment. Again, still nothing for solar.

The 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act prioritizes deep geologic repositories for safe storage and/or disposal of radioactive waste. Unfortunately, 25 years after being designated as the disposal site, Nevada’s Yucca Mountain has never opened, because of conflicts among politicians, locals, anti-nuclear activists, government officials and the nuclear industry. The U.S. still stores its nuclear waste at 75 scattered sites, including some near New York City, New Orleans and Chicago. For solar no steps have been taken.

While coal, nuclear, and petrochemical companies must come up with detailed, costly plans for dealing with real or potential negative consequences of their operations, solar (and wind) companies have been rewarded with massive subsidies and absolutely no disposal standards or requirements.

No government grants require that solar companies set aside money to dispose of, store or recycle wastes generated during manufacturing or after massive solar “farms” have ceased functioning and been torn down. Solar (and wind) customers are likewise not charged for waste cleanup, disposal, or reuse and recycling. This and the massive subsidies distort and hide the true costs of solar power.

But reality is starting to catch up. Disposal (or recycling) costs will have to be paid, ultimately by consumers. The more solar panels we have (likely billions within a few years), the higher those costs will be. Consumers in states like California that have committed to heavy reliance on solar (and wind) energy (and already have the nation’s highest energy bills) will have to pay even more.

California is also facing a secondary problem from the proliferation of subsidized industrial solar installations. A 2015 study by Stanford University and the Carnegie Institution for Science found that nearly a third of the state’s solar development is occurring on former cropland, where many farmers are shifting from growing crops to using their land to generate electricity – rather than letting it become wildlife habitat. As Big Solar also moves into natural areas, California is losing even more habitat and scenic land, while the integrity of state and national parks suffers from the nearby glare of countless solar panels and towering transmission lines to distant cities.

The Stanford study highlights another problem: localized higher temperatures. It found it will take an area the size of South Carolina filled with solar arrays to meet California’s goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. [It would take at least eight South Carolinas if the California mandate were extended nationwide.]

Other research has found that these large-scale solar power plants raise local temperatures, creating a significant solar heat island effect. Temperatures around one solar power plant were 5.4o-7.2 °F (3o-4°C) warmer than nearby wildlands. Imagine such manmade “global warming” across 20 million acres (South Carolina) or 160 million acres (Texas), to meet California or U.S. greenhouse gas reduction goals!

Australia is already coping with this unwelcome reality. Not until 2018 did Aussie environment ministers mandate fast-track development of new product stewardship schemes for photovoltaic (PV) solar panels, like those television and computer manufacturers and retailers have had to comply with since 2011.

Total Environment Centre director Jeff Angel admitted that setting standards for life-of-product management for solar panels was “long overdue,” and that the 30-year delay in imposing standards revealed a “fundamental weakness” in Australia’s waste policies. He further noted that while solar panels contain hazardous substances, Aussies are “sending hundreds of thousands of e-waste items to landfills” and creating significant pollution problems. And Australia has less than a tenth of the U.S. population!

Since 2002, the European Union’s Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive has required that original producers of e-wastes guarantee and pay for taking back and recycling their wastes, so that end-user consumers aren’t surprised by additional disposal costs.

However, PV solar panel waste was not included in this mandate until July 2012 – and “some uncertainty remains” about the cutoff date for such wastes, because the directive has yet to be implemented in national laws. Producer financing of PV waste treatment thus cannot be applied to older solar panels. So who will pay? And how much?

Ms. Folk and others look to waste-to-energy plants, and indeed the EU does send much of its solar panel waste to incinerators – which many environmentalists oppose. Landfilling is not a viable option in the U.S., because toxins could leach out. Unscrupulous companies ship solar panel waste to developing nations, but that is a stopgap solution that is environmentally irresponsible.

Tao Meng, lead author of a new study, says “the big blind spot in the U.S. for recycling is that the cost far exceeds the revenue” – by nearly 10-to-1, especially when including transportation costs. Chemicals must be used to remove silver and lead from silicon modules before they can be safely placed in landfills, Meng notes.

The problem of solar panel waste will continue to grow as more panels reach their end of life. Four years ago the International Renewable Energy Agency estimated there were already about 250,000 metric tons of solar panel waste worldwide – and that total will explode to 78 million metric tons by 2050!

So when you read that solar energy is already cheaper than natural gas, don’t be fooled. They are omitting the pollution and disposal costs, as well as habitat losses, solar heat islands, and the need for backup power generation or batteries – to lowball the true costs of intermittent, season, latitude and weather-dependent solar. We need some honest math now, before it’s too late to turn back.

Watts Up With That?"

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Now compare to with the handy little GE nuclear reactors:
https://www.covid-19forum.org/index.php?topic=1793.0

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reserve

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https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-65602519

"Solar panels - an eco-disaster waiting to happen?



By Daniel Gordon
The Climate Question podcast, BBC Sounds

While they are being promoted around the world as a crucial weapon in reducing carbon emissions, solar panels only have a lifespan of up to 25 years.

Experts say billions of panels will eventually all need to be disposed of and replaced.

"The world has installed more than one terawatt of solar capacity. Ordinary solar panels have a capacity of about 400W, so if you count both rooftops and solar farms, there could be as many as 2.5 billion solar panels.," says Dr Rong Deng, an expert in solar panel recycling at the University of New South Wales in Australia.

According to the British government, there are tens of millions of solar panels in the UK. But the specialist infrastructure to scrap and recycle them is lacking.

Energy experts are calling for urgent government action to prevent a looming global environmental disaster.

"It's going to be a waste mountain by 2050, unless we get recycling chains going now," says Ute Collier, deputy director of the International Renewable Energy Agency.

"We're producing more and more solar panels - which is great - but how are we going to deal with the waste?" she asks.

    BBC Sounds - The Climate Question - How renewable are renewables?

It is hoped a major step will be taken at the end of June, when the world's first factory dedicated to fully recycling solar panels officially opens in France.

ROSI, the specialist solar recycling company which owns the facility, in the Alpine city of Grenoble, hopes eventually to be able to extract and re-use 99% of a unit's components.

As well as recycling the glass fronts and aluminium frames, the new factory can recover nearly all of the precious materials contained within the panels, such as silver and copper, which are typically some of the hardest materials to extract.

These rare materials can subsequently be recycled and reused to make new, more powerful, solar units.
Silver fragments recovered from solar panelsImage source, RoSI
Image caption,
Silver fragments recovered from solar panels, at the ROSI plant in Grenoble

Conventional methods of recycling solar panels recover most of the aluminium and glass - but ROSI says the glass, in particular, is of relatively low-quality.

The glass recovered using those methods can be used to create tiles, or in sandblasting - it can also be mixed with other materials to make asphalt - but it cannot be used in applications where high-grade glass is required, such as the production of new solar panels.
Boom period

The new ROSI plant will open during a boom period for solar panel installations.

The world's solar energy generation capacity grew by 22% in 2021. Around 13,000 photovoltaic (PV) solar panels are fitted in the UK every month - most of them on the roofs of private houses.

In many cases, solar units become relatively uneconomical before they reach the end of their expected lifespan. New, more efficient designs evolve at regular intervals, meaning it can prove cheaper to replace solar panels that are only 10 or 15 years old with updated versions.

If current growth trends are sustained, Ms Collier says, the volume of scrap solar panels could be huge.

"By 2030, we think we're going to have four million tonnes [of scrap] - which is still manageable - but by 2050, we could end up with more than 200 million tonnes globally."

To put that into perspective, the world currently produces a total of 400 million tonnes of plastic every year.
Recycling challenges

The reason there are so few facilities for recycling solar panels is because there has not been much waste to process and reuse until recently.

The first generation of domestic solar panels is only now coming to the end of its usable life. With those units now approaching retirement, experts say urgent action is needed.

"Now is the time to think about this," says Ms Collier.

France is already a leader among European nations when it comes to processing photovoltaic waste, says Nicolas Defrenne. His organisation, Soren, partners with ROSI and other firms, co-ordinating the decommissioning of solar panels all over France.

"The biggest one [we decommissioned] took three months," Mr Defrenne recalls.

His team at Soren has been experimenting with different ways of recycling what they collect: "We're throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks."
Solar panel recycling processImage source, Laurent Julliand
Image caption,
Solar panels are delaminated in order to recover precious materials

At ROSI's high-tech plant in Grenoble, the solar panels are painstakingly taken apart to recover the precious materials inside - such as copper, silicon and silver.

Each solar panel contains only tiny fragments of these precious materials and those fragments are so intertwined with other components that, until now, it has not been economically viable to separate them.

But because they are so valuable, extracting those precious materials efficiently could be a game-changer, says Mr Defrenne.

"Over 60% of the value is contained in 3% of the weight of the solar panels," he says.

The team at Soren are hopeful that, in the future, nearly three-quarters of the materials needed to make new solar panels - including silver - can be recovered from retired PV units and recycled - to help speed up production of new panels.

Currently there is not enough silver available to build the millions of solar panels which will be required in the the transition from fossil fuels, says Mr Defrenne: "You can see where you have a production bottleneck, it's silver."
Large truck transports solar panelsImage source, Laurent Julliand
Image caption,
A lorry loaded with solar panels

Meanwhile British scientists have been trying to develop similar technology to ROSI.

Last year, researchers at the University of Leicester announced they had worked out how to extract silver from PV units using a form of saline.

But so far, ROSI is the only company in its field to have scaled up its operation to industrial levels.

Moreover, the technology is expensive. In Europe, importers or producers of solar panels are responsible for disposing of them when they become expendable. And many favour crushing or shredding the waste - which is far cheaper.

Mr Defrenne acknowledges that intensive recycling of solar panels is still in its infancy. Soren and its partners recycled just under 4,000 tonnes of French solar panels last year.

But there is potential to do a lot more. And he's making that his mission.

"The weight of all the new solar panels sold last year in France was 232,000 tonnes - so, by the time those wear out in 20 years, that's how much I'll need to collect every year.

"When that happens, my personal goal is to ensure France will be the technological leader of the world."