The unexpected environmental hazard that solar panels can generate

The lifespan of solar panels, which are currently being promoted around the world as a crucial tool to help reduce CO2 emissions, is up to 25 years.

Experts warn that this means ultimately billions of panels will have to be demolished and replaced.

“The world has installed more than one terawatt of solar capacity. Ordinary solar panels have a capacity of around 400W, so if you include roofs and solar parks, there could be up to 2.5 billion solar panelssays 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 the specialized infrastructure to dispose of and recycle them is insufficient.

Energy experts do one Call for urgent government action to prevent impending global environmental catastrophe.

“By 2050 we will have a mountain of waste unless we start recycling chains now,” said Ute Collier, deputy director of the International Renewable Energy Agency.

“We are producing more and more solar panels, which is great, but how do we deal with the waste?” he wonders.

recycling

A big step is expected at the end of June, when the world’s first factory dedicated to the complete recycling of solar panels will officially open in France.

ROSI, the company specializing in solar recycling that owns the installation in the Alpine city of Grenoble, it eventually expects to be able to extract and reuse 99% of the drives’ components.

In addition to recycling the glass fronts and aluminum frames, the new plant can recover almost all of the precious materials in the panels, such as silver and copper, usually some of the hardest to source.

These rare materials can later be recycled and reused to make new, more powerful solar units.

Conventional solar panel recycling methods recover most of the aluminum and glassbut ROSI says glass in particular is of relatively low quality.

Glass recovered in this way can be used to make tiles or mixed with other materials to make asphalt, but it cannot be used in applications where high-quality glass is required, such as the production of new solar panels.

heyday

The new ROSI factory is opened during a boom in the installation of solar panels.

Global solar power generation capacity will grow 22% by 2021. Around 13,000 solar panels are installed every month in the UK, most of them on the roofs of private homes.

In many cases, solar panels become relatively unprofitable before reaching the end of their expected lifespan. New, more efficient designs are added regularly, which can make it cheaper to replace solar panels that are only 10 or 15 years old with updated versions.

If current growth trends continue, the number of discarded solar panels could be huge, according to Collier.

“By 2030, we estimate we will have four million tons [de desechos]which is still manageable, but by 2050 we could end up with more than 200 million tons worldwide”.

To put it in perspective, The world currently produces a total of 400 million tons of plastic per year.

recycling challenges

The reason there are so few facilities to recycle solar panels is because until recently there wasn’t much waste to process and reuse.

The first generation of solar panels for home use is now approaching the end of its useful life. With those units nearing retirement, experts say urgent action is needed.

“Now is the time to think about this,” says Collier.

According to Nicolas Defrenne, France is already a leader among European countries in processing photovoltaic waste (ie objects that convert light into electricity). His organization, Soren, is working with ROSI and other companies to coordinate the removal of solar panels across France.

“The biggest [que retiramos] it took us three months,” recalls Defrenne.

His team at Soren has been experimenting with different ways to recycle what they collect: “We try everything and see what works.”

At ROSI’s state-of-the-art factory in Grenoble, solar panels are painstakingly dismantled 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 it was not economically feasible to separate them until now.

But because of their great value, efficiently extracting those precious materials could be a game changer, according to Defrenne.

“More than 60% of the value is in 3% of the weight of the solar panels,” he says.

Soren’s team hopes that in the future, nearly three-quarters of the materials needed to make new solar panels, including silver, can be recovered from decommissioned PV units and recycled to speed up the production of new panels.

There isn’t enough silver currently available to build the millions of solar panels that will be needed in the transition from fossil fuels, says Defrenne: “You can see where the manufacturing bottleneck is, it’s silver.”

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

Last year, researchers at the University of Leicester announced they had discovered how to extract silver from photovoltaic units using a form of saline solution.

But so far, ROSI is the only company in its field that has scaled its operations to industrial levels.

In addition, the technology is expensive. In Europe, importers or manufacturers of solar panels are responsible for disposing of them when they become unusable. And many prefer to shred or shred the waste, which is much cheaper.

Defrenne acknowledges that the intensive recycling of solar panels is still in its infancy. Soren and his partners recycled nearly 4,000 tons of French solar panels last year.

But the potential exists to do much more. And he has made it his mission.

“The weight of all new solar panels sold in France last year was 232,000 tons, so if they wear out in 20 years, that’s how much I have to collect each year.

“When that happens, my personal goal is to make France the technology leader in the world.”