Invention of the day
Just for the record … Solar Panel Recycling Makes No Sense.
A standard silicon solar panel is mostly glass with an aluminium frame (except for frameless modules). At the end of life, the sensible approach is to remove the aluminium and any accessible copper cabling, onsite, and then put the remainder into a garbage compactor truck and bury it in the closest landfill.
The residual glass, silicon and polymers have negative value. Recovering them requires collection, transport, delamination, crushing, separation, cleaning and sometimes further purification. All of that costs money and produces emissions. The recovered glass is low grade, silicon is abundant and the valuable trace materials exist in quantities too small to change the calculation.
That is, any regulation that forces recycling of these materials is both adding costs and carbon footprint to solar energy.
The overall goal is to recover the recoverable bits and dispose of the rest with minimal logistics/transport. That means you can’t do it at centralised locations.
Consequently, the invention of the day is a mobile solar-panel disposal truck used to remove the aluminium and copper on site, after which the remainder is fed into its integrated garbage compactor.
The aluminium must be removed and the remainder crushed on site because transporting whole modules also has negative financial and emissions consequences. Unfortunately, the glass, polymers and silicon make up the heavy part.
Image supplied by AI.
offshore westerly 