Solar Panel Recycling: Turning ticking time bombs into opportunities

Australia has certainly increased its appetite for solar power. As the average lifespan of a solar panel being approximately 20 years, the installations from the early 2000’s are set to reach their end-of-life. Will they end up in landfill or be recycled?

Not only the cost of recycling is higher than landfill, but also the value of recovered materials is smaller than the original. Therefore, the interest in recycling is limited. However, given the presence of heavy metals, such as lead and tin, managing the waste poorly can lead to another recycling crisis. A potential time bomb could present itself as an opportunity, however, if the global EV industry showed an interest in the recovered solar products.

The emission of pollution from the hazardous materials in the end-of-life panels can result in significant health issues, if released into the environment. To close the energy cycle, the next task of the solar panel industry is the safe recycling of end-of-life products. In the waste management hierarchy, however, re-use or value-added recovery/re-purposing is preferable to recycling.

The main contributor to the total weight of a typical crystalline silicon PV module is glass (75%), followed by polymer (10%), aluminum (8%), silicon (5%), copper (1%) and small amounts of silver, tin, lead, and other metals and components. Lead and tin, after leaching into soil and groundwater can cause health and environmental concerns, whereas copper, silver, and silicon present a value opportunity if recovered efficiently. So, the landfill option should be fully replaced with recycling to prevent environmental pollution and retrieve the valuable materials present in the panel.

Currently, considering all the impact of recycling, it isn’t be considered the economically favorable option. Therefore, economic incentives are required to accelerate this displacement.

Among the valuable materials in the panel, the best opportunity lies in silicon, given its considerably larger fraction and its ultra-high purity (99.9999% or six nines/6N). The solar-grade silicon from PV waste can be recovered for second-use applications in solar panels or repurposed for value-added application in the anode of the 3b generation of Lithium-ion batteries.

As the solar energy has gained momentum in the past few years, it is expected that more than 100,000 tonnes of solar panels will enter Australia’s waste stream by 2035. But one should think that whether it is the crisis or an opportunity?

If you look up solar panel recycling in Australia, there are a number of services. However, mostly they can recycle less than 20% by weight – the aluminium frame and the terminal boxes. Recycling the remaining 80%, including the precious silicon, is not currently offered in Australia, but it does not have to remain like that.

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