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Don’t worry, the same actors who are very worried about recycling EV batteries (but now phone and laptop ones for some reason) will ignore little things like useful lifespan or reuse, focus on how few solar panels are getting recycled compared to being built, and then go back to explaining how all these renewables are really so much worse for the environment than perfectly good Clean Coal and gas pickup trucks.
Renewables absolutely crush all types of fossil fuels when taking the whole life cycle into account. That mean accounting for manufacturing, use, disassembly and recycling.
Yes, obviously, but for some reason they don’t bring that up as much.
I think it’s really good that for once people are thinking about the end of a product before the waste becomes a problem.
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Suddenly, concerns about the waste left behind when solar panels hit end-of-life became so common that researchers at the US’s National Renewable Energy Lab felt compelled to publish a commentary in Nature Physics debunking them.
Solar panels also have a useful lifespan of decades, and the vast majority of those in existence are less than 10 years old, so waste hasn’t even become much of a problem yet.
But a group of researchers from Wuhan University have figured out an alternative means of recycling that avoids the production of toxic waste, and is more energy-efficient as a bonus.
The new work, rather than focusing on completely dissolving the materials used in constructing the panel, relies on a brief chemical treatment that largely severs the connections among the individual layers.
The process starts with physically removing the aluminum frame and glass cover, both of which can be melted and reused for manufacturing.
This leaves the cells, which the researchers disassemble using a molten mixture of sodium and potassium hydroxide, which undergoes chemical reactions with most of the components it comes in contact with.
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