![]() Only about $2 to $4 worth of materials are recovered from each panel. ![]() Orben said the economics of the process don’t make a compelling case for recycling. That’s because California’s rigorous permitting system for toxic materials makes it exceedingly difficult to set up shop, Orben said. Instead, the panels are trucked to a site in Yuma, Ariz. The vast majority of We Recycle Solar’s business comes from California, but the company has no facilities in the state. “There’s no doubt that there will be an increase in the solar panels entering the waste stream in the next decade or so,” said AJ Orben, vice president of We Recycle Solar, a Phoenix-based company that breaks down panels and extracts the valuable metals while disposing of toxic elements. , and the solar industry is expected to quadruple in size between 20.Īlthough 80% of a typical photovoltaic panel is made of recyclable materials, disassembling them and recovering the glass, silver and silicon is extremely difficult. A new solar project was installed every 60 seconds in 2021, according to a fact sheet published by the Solar Energy Industries Assn. It’s not just a problem in California but also nationwide. “But while all the focus has been on building this renewable capacity, not much consideration has been put on the end of life of these technologies.”ĭuran co-wrote a recent article in the Harvard Business Review that noted the industry’s “capacity is woefully unprepared for the deluge of waste that is likely to come.” “This trash is probably going to arrive sooner than we expected and it is going to be a huge amount of waste,” said Serasu Duran, an assistant professor at the University of Calgary’s Haskayne School of Business in Canada. ![]() Now, both regulators and panel manufacturers are realizing that they don’t have the capacity to handle what comes next. Because of that and other measures, such as requirements that utilities buy a portion of their electricity from renewable sources, solar power now accounts for 15% of the state’s power.īut as California barreled ahead on its renewable-energy program, focusing on rebates and - more recently - a proposed solar tax, questions about how to handle the waste that would accrue years later were never fully addressed. The measure exceeded its goals, bringing down the price of solar panels and boosting the share of the state’s electricity produced by the sun. That granted $3.3 billion in subsidies for installing solar panels on rooftops. Small governmental rebates did little to bring down the price of solar panels or to encourage their adoption until 2006, when the California Public Utilities Commission formed the California Solar Initiative. “But in reality, it’s all about the money.”Ĭalifornia came early to solar power. “The industry is supposed to be green,” Vanderhoof said. The looming challenge over how to handle truckloads of waste, some of it contaminated, illustrates how cutting-edge environmental policy can create unforeseen problems down the road. Sam Vanderhoof, a solar industry expert and chief executive of Recycle PV Solar, says that only 1 in 10 panels are actually recycled, according to estimates drawn from International Renewable Energy Agency data on decommissioned panels and from industry leaders. Many are already winding up in landfills, where in some cases, they could potentially contaminate groundwater with toxic heavy metals such as lead, selenium and cadmium. Additionally, in a discussion of transporting photovoltaic panels to recycling or hazardous waste disposal facilities, the word “cells” has been changed to “panels” for accuracy. The article has also been updated to reflect Shah’s current professional affiliation as well as that of Sam Vanderhoof.Īn earlier version of this article also stated that 25 years was the life cycle of photovoltaic panels the text has been updated to reflect that 25 to 30 years is the typical service life but not a fixed limit. It also misidentified the group as the Solar Energy Industry Assn.Īn earlier version of this article also failed to properly attribute quotes by Jigar Shah, director of the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, to their source, a 2020 interview with PV Magazine. This story has been edited to clarify that panels containing toxic materials are routed for disposal to landfills with extra safeguards against leakage, and to note that panels that contain cadmium and selenium are primarily used in utility-grade applications.Īn earlier version of this article also misattributed a statement by Evelyn Butler, vice president of technical services at the Solar Energy Industries Assn., to Jen Bristol, the group’s senior director of communications. An earlier version of this article mischaracterized the environmental risk posed by heavy metals in consumer photovoltaic arrays.
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