Solar Panel Recycling Challenges: Are We Ready for Huge Volumes of Photovoltaic Toxic Trash?

In recent years, scientists have expressed concerns about the increasing amount of carbon emission from industries and its contribution to global warming. Various solutions have been proposed with a focus on sustainable energy resources. One of the increasingly popular energy sources is solar panels which convert sunlight into electricity through photovoltaic panels. Although solar energy is promoted as a potential solution to the energy crisis, it also raises challenges in terms of waste management.

(Photo: Pexels/ Mark Stebnicki)

Looming Challenge of Solar Panel Waste

In the future, billions of solar panels worldwide will be disposed of as scrap. Since solar panels can only last up to 25 years, experts raise the question about the disposal of each unit upon reaching their lifespan.

Currently, over one terawatt of solar capacity has been installed worldwide and is projected to grow to 4.5 terawatts by 2050. If ordinary solar panels have a total of 400W, there are almost 2.5 billion solar panels. This was confirmed by solar panel recycling expert Dr. Rong Deng from the University of New South Wales in Australia.

In 2021, the solar energy generation capacity in the world grew by 22%. In the UK, tens of millions of solar panels are installed, equivalent to 13,000 photovoltaic solar panels fitted monthly. Despite this booming trend in solar panel installation, especially in private houses, insufficient specialist infrastructure exists for scrapping and recycling them. Even before reaching the end of their lifespan, solar units are found to be uneconomical.

Because of this, experts are seeking urgent action from the government to prevent the forthcoming global environmental mess. Scientists expect considerable scrap solar panels if the current unit demands are continuously met. About four million tonnes of scrap solar panels are predicted to be generated globally by 2030, reaching 200 million tonnes by 2050.

International Renewable Energy Agency deputy director said, "It's going to be a waste mountain by 2050, unless we get recycling chains going now." She also added that as we produce more solar panels, we should also deal with the waste they will have.

Potential Solutions for Solar Panel Disposal

By the end of June, specialist solar recycling company ROSI plans to open in the Alpine city of Grenoble in France. It owns the first factory in the world entirely dedicated to recycling solar panels: particularly glass fronts and aluminum frames. ROSI hopes to extract and reuse 99% of the components of a solar panel unit.

ROSI's high-tech plant can also recover precious materials such as copper, silicon, and silver, the hardest materials to extract from a solar panel. Tiny fragments of these materials are intertwined with other components inside each solar panel, and there was no way to separate them. After being removed, rare materials can be used in creating new and more powerful units of solar panels.

ROSI was joined by the eco-organization Soren which collaborates with other firms to decommission solar panels all over France. Formerly known as PV Cycle France, Soren organizes the country's collection, sorting, and recycling of photovoltaic modules.

A similar technology was developed in 2022 by researchers at the University of Leicester. They reported that they were able to extract silver out of old solar panels using a form of saline instead of acid. The extracted silver can be reused as components to create new units of solar panels or make microchips and circuit boards inside computers. Although the operation has not yet been scaled up to the industrial level, the researchers hope that their developed method can also be used in recycling silver from other devices such as smartphones.