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Photovoltaic panels are a boon for clean energy but are tricky to recycle. As the oldest ones expire, get ready for a solar e-waste glut.

…the solar e-waste glut is coming. By 2050, the International Renewable Energy Agency projects that up to 78 million metric tons of solar panels will have reached the end of their life, and that the world will be generating about 6 million metric tons of new solar e-waste annually. While the latter number is a small fraction of the total e-waste humanity produces each year, standard electronics recycling methods don’t cut it for solar panels. Recovering the most valuable materials from one, including silver and silicon, requires bespoke recycling solutions. And if we fail to develop those solutions along with policies that support their widespread adoption, we already know what will happen.

“If we don’t mandate recycling, many of the modules will go to landfill,” said Arizona State University solar researcher Meng Tao, who recently authored a review paper on recycling silicon solar panels, which comprise 95 percent of the solar market.

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This is not a condemnation of solar power itself - but a lesson in how green capitalism undermines it’s own efforts by attempting to create a consumer market for what should remain infrastructural.

The type of photovoltaic panels are being sold to individual homeowners as a responsible purchase to help the environment. However the reality is that these panels are simply cheap enough that a market can be created, which is untrue for other solar systems.

PV panels are inefficient, especially when they are simply bolted to a roof. The more efficient systems of solar power are not things which can be sold to the average homeowner, and thus are not as popular within capitalism. This inefficiency is precisely what will generate the e-waste in question.

Efficient systems of solar power are centralized facilities where mirrors are used to reflect sunlight onto a particular location. The most common version of this still uses PV panels, however they are able to use less panels and get much higher output through auxiliary systems - mirrors, sun-tracking, and so on which remain unavailable to consumers.

The far more promising method of solar power does not use Photovoltaics at all. Concentrated solar thermal has more in common with geo-thermal than it does your typical PV grid. These power plants use a field of mirrors to reflect a huge amount of sunlight into one location, transferring a lot of heat to that one location. The heat is converted into electricity via a steam turbine.

Additionally because Solar-Thermal is a heat based system, power can be retained in the form of heat using systems like molten salt. This reduces the demand for efficient systems of storing electricity itself, one of the greatest challenges to both photovoltaic and wind based power systems.