Increasingly sold around the world, the panels have a relatively short useful life and can cause a technology waste problem without proper disposal.
While being promoted around the world as a crucial aid to reducing carbon emissions, solar panels have a lifespan of only 25 years.
Experts say billions of panels will eventually need to be torn down and replaced.
“The world has more than a terawatt of solar capacity installed. Ordinary solar panels have a capacity of about 400W, so if you count rooftops and solar farms, there could be as many as 2.5 billion solar panels,” he says The Doctor. Rong Deng, a solar panel recycling expert 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 specialized infrastructure to dispose and recycle them is lacking.
Energy experts are calling for urgent government action to avert an imminent global environmental disaster.
“By 2050 it will be a mountain of rubbish, unless we put recycling chains in place now,” says Ute Collier, deputy director of the International Renewable Energy Agency.
“We’re making more and more solar panels, which is great, but how are we going to deal with waste?” she asks.
A big step should be taken at the end of June, when the first factory in the world dedicated to the total recycling of solar panels will officially open in France.
ROSI, the solar recycling company that owns the plant in the Alpine city of Grenoble, expects to be able to extract and reuse 99% of the components of a unit.
In addition to recycling the glass fronts and aluminum frames, the new factory is able to recover almost all of the precious materials contained in the panels, such as silver and copper, which are typically among the most difficult materials to extract.
These rare materials can later be recycled and reused to make new, more powerful solar units.
Conventional methods of recycling solar panels recover most of the aluminum and glass, but ROSI says glass, in particular, is of relatively low quality.
The glass recovered by these methods can be used in the production of tiles, or in sandblasting – it can even be mixed with other materials to make asphalt -, but it cannot be used in applications that require high quality glass, such as the production of new solar panels.
Growth stage
The new ROSI plant will open during a period of expansion for solar panel installations.
Global solar power generation capacity grew by 22% in 2021. Around 13,000 solar PV panels are installed in the UK each month, most of them on the roofs of private homes.
In many cases, solar units become relatively uneconomical before reaching the end of their expected useful lives.
New, more efficient designs evolve at regular intervals, meaning it can be cheaper to replace solar panels that are only 10 or 15 years old with upgraded versions.
If current growth trends are sustained, Collier says, the volume of scrap solar panels could be enormous.
“By 2030, we think we will have four million tons [de sucata] – which is still manageable – but by 2050 we could end up with over 200 million tonnes globally.”
To put that into perspective, the world currently produces a total of 400 million tons of plastic each year.
recycling challenges
The reason there are so few solar panel recycling facilities is because until recently there wasn’t a lot of waste to process and reuse.
The first generation of home solar panels is only now reaching the end of its useful life. With these units nearing retirement, experts say urgent action is needed.
“Now is the time to think about it,” says Ms. Collier.
France is already a leader among European nations when it comes to PV waste treatment, says Nicolas Defrenne.
His organization, Soren, works with ROSI and other companies, coordinating the decommissioning of solar panels across France.
“The biggest [que desativamos] it took three months,” recalls Defrenne.
His team at Soren has been experimenting with different ways to recycle what they collect: “We’re throwing everything on the wall and seeing what sticks.”
In ROSI’s high-tech plant in Grenoble, solar panels are carefully dismantled to recover precious materials such as copper, silicon and silver.
Each solar panel contains only tiny fragments of these precious materials, and these fragments are so intertwined with other components that, until now, it hasn’t been economically feasible to separate them.
But because they’re so valuable, efficiently extracting these precious materials can be a game changer, says Defrenne.
“More than 60% of the value is contained in 3% of the weight of 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 salvaged from disused PV units and recycled to speed up the production of new panels.
There isn’t currently enough silver available to build the millions of solar panels that will be needed in the transition to fossil fuels, says Defrenne: “You can see where there’s a bottleneck in manufacturing, it’s silver.”
Meanwhile, British scientists have been trying to develop a technology similar to ROSI.
Last year, researchers at the University of Leicester announced that they had figured out how to extract silver from photovoltaic units using a form of saline solution.
But so far, ROSI is the only company in its segment to scale its operations to industrial levels.
Also, the technology is expensive. In Europe, importers or manufacturers of solar panels are responsible for their disposal when they become disposable. And many prefer to shred or shred their waste, which is much cheaper.
Defrenne acknowledges that the intensive recycling of solar panels is still in its infancy. Last year, Soren and its partners recycled just under 4,000 tons of French solar panels.
But there is the potential to do much more. And he is making it his mission.
“The weight of all new solar panels sold last year in France was 232,000 tons, so when they wear out over 20 years, that’s how much I’ll have to collect each year.
“When that happens, my personal goal is to ensure that France is the technology leader in the world.”
Source: Terra
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