Recyclers often take off the panel’s frame and its junction box to recover the aluminum and copper, then shred the rest of the module, including the glass, polymers, and silicon cells, which get coated in a silver electrode and soldered using tin and lead. And if we fail to develop those solutions along with policies that support their widespread adoption, we already know what will happen.Īt a typical e-waste facility, this high-tech sandwich will be treated crudely. Recovering the most valuable materials from one, including silver and silicon, requires bespoke recycling solutions. 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. 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. They are also complex pieces of technology that become big, bulky sheets of electronic waste at the end of their lives-and right now, most of the world doesn’t have a plan for dealing with that.īut we’ll need to develop one soon, because the solar e-waste glut is coming. Solar panels are an increasingly important source of renewable power that will play an essential role in fighting climate change.
This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.