Although solar panels are touted around the world as an important weapon in reducing carbon emissions, they only last 25 years.
Experts say billions of panels will eventually fail and need to be replaced.
“More than 4,000 watts of solar power have been installed worldwide. Conventional solar modules have an output of around 400 watts. So if you include rooftops and solar farms, the number could reach 2.5 billion," said Dr. Rong Ding, recycling expert. Solar panels at the University of New South Wales in Australia.
Tens of millions of solar panels will be installed in the UK, according to the UK government. However, there is no special infrastructure for disposal and processing.
Energy experts are urging the government to take urgent action to prevent a looming global environmental catastrophe.
"By 2050, this mountain will turn into a desert if we don't build a recycling chain now," said Ote Collier, deputy director of the International Renewable Energy Agency.
"We're making more solar panels - that's great - but how do we deal with the waste?" he asked.
A big step is to be taken at the end of June, when the world's first complete solar cell recycling plant will be officially opened in France.
ROSI, a solar cell recycling company with facilities in the alpine town of Grenoble, hopes to recover and reuse 99% of device components.
In addition to recycling glass facades and aluminum frames, the new plant can also recover all valuable materials in the panels, such as silver and copper, which are usually the most difficult to extract.
This rare material can then be recycled and reused to make new, more powerful solar cells.
Traditional solar panel recycling methods recover a lot of aluminum and glass, but glass in particular is of relatively poor quality, according to ROSI.
Glass made this way can be used to make tiles or sandblasting — and it can also be mixed with other materials to make asphalt — but it can't be used where high-quality glass is needed, like new solar panels .
boom time
The new ROSI factory opens during the solar installation boom.
By 2021, global solar energy capacity will increase by 22%. Around 13,000 photovoltaic (PV) solar panels are installed in the UK each month, mostly on rooftops.
In many cases, solar systems become relatively uneconomical even before the expected end of their service life. New, more efficient designs are being developed regularly, which means that it is cheaper to replace solar panels that are only 10 or 15 years old with improved versions.
If the current growth trend continues, the solar panel lag could be huge, Collier says.
"We expect to have four million tons [scrap] by 2030 - that's still doable - but by 2050 we could have more than 200 million tons globally."
To put this in perspective, the world currently produces a total of 400 million tons of plastic every year.
recycling problem
The reason there are so few recycling companies for solar panels is that until recently there wasn't much waste that could be recycled and reused.
The first generation of residential solar panels has just reached the end of its useful life. As these units retire, experts say urgent action is needed.
"Now is the time to think about it," said the lady. necklace.
France is already a leader among European countries when it comes to recycling photovoltaic waste, says Nicolas Defren. His organization Soren is working with ROSI and others to coordinate solar shutdowns across France.
“The biggest effort [we] took three months,” recalls Devrin.
His team in Surin is experimenting with different ways of processing the harvest: "We throw everything against the wall and see what sticks."
In ROSI's high-tech factory in Grenoble, solar modules are carefully dismantled to extract valuable materials such as copper, silicon and silver.
Each solar panel contains only tiny pieces of these valuable materials, and these pieces are so intertwined with other components that it has hitherto been economically impossible to separate them.
But because they're so valuable, efficiently extracting these precious materials could be game-changing, Herr says. defense
"Over 60% of the cost is 3% of the weight of the solar panel," he says.
Soren's team hopes that in the future, nearly three-quarters of the materials needed to make new solar panels, including silver, can be recovered from old photovoltaic panels and recycled to speed up the production of new panels.
Currently, there isn't enough silver to make the millions of solar panels needed for the fossil-fuel transition, Herr said. Defren: "You can see where the production bottleneck is, and that's silver."
Meanwhile, British scientists are trying to develop a ROSI-like technology.
Last year, researchers at the University of Leicester announced they had developed a method for extracting silver from photovoltaic panels using brine.
Currently, however, ROSI is the only company in its sector that has brought its activities to an industrial level.
In addition, the equipment is very expensive. In Europe, the importer or manufacturer of solar modules disposes of them when they are no longer usable. Many prefer to shred or shred the waste, which is significantly cheaper.
Mr Defrin acknowledged that intensive recycling of solar panels is still in its infancy. Last year, Soren and his partners recycled less than 4,000 tons of French solar panels.
But there is potential to do even more. And he has made it his mission.
“All new solar panels sold in France last year weighed 232,000 tons. So if they run out in 20 years, I'll have to collect that much every year.
"If that happens, my personal goal is to make France the world technology leader."
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