With the average lifespan of a solar panel at roughly 20-30 years, installations from the early 2000s are set to reach end-of-life. Will they end up in landfill or be recycled? The cost of recycling currently is higher than landfill, and the value of recovered materials is smaller than the original, so there’s limited interest in recycling. But given the presence of heavy metals, if waste is managed poorly, we’re on track for another recycling crisis.
The main contributor to the total weight of a typical crystalline silicon PV module is glass (76%), 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, if leached into soil and groundwater cause health and environmental concerns, while 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.
* PV RECYCLING PROGRAM (PVRP) <-- Download PDF .....
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START WITH A PVRP EVALUATION - To close the loop in the energy cycle, the next mission of the solar panel industry is the safe disposal or recycling of end-of-life products. In the waste management hierarchy, however, re-use or value-added recovery/re-purposing is considered preferable to recycling. Among the valuable materials in the panel, silicon presents the best opportunity, 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 anodes of advanced lithium-ion batteries. The growing number of electric vehicles has presented an opportunity to the materials recycling world and waste management industry; and there may be room for used solar panels too. Today’s EV batteries are an essential part of the total EV cost (33% to 57% depending on the car), and materials production is the dominant contributor to the energy cost of making the batteries. Cost-cutting strategies rely heavily on innovations at the materials level, i.e. raw materials sourcing and processing.
* PV RECYCLING PROGRAM (PVRP) <-- Download PDF .....
While as users, we can’t do much but rely on responsible recycling businesses to properly dispose of solar panel waste, as scientists and engineers, we may be able to do more. Providing scientific evidence on the potential impacts and benefits of recycling PV panels could incentivize the government and industry. Introducing the SPWR – Solar Panels Waste Recycling.
The process of recycling silicon modules in Europe began more than a decade ago; however, the problem associated with most processes developed to date is that the recovery rate is not more than 80% and the value of the retrieved materials is not competitive compared to the originals. The SPWR process our team is developing can extract purer metals from solar cells. The metals would be worth +$12.00 per module, that is enough to pay for the recycling, compared with about $3.00 in the current PV high temperature recycle process.
Our collaborative study with The Group of Research in Environment from Materials at the University of Texas in Austin, provides such evidence. Evidence that in the future, end-of-life solar panels using our SPWR process may prove to be a valuable secondary resource for a critical material in electric-vehicle batteries: Ultra-pure Nano-structured Silicon.
Just as important, the use of moderate temperatures prevented the melting and diffusing of metallic contacts components into other photovoltaic components, such as glass and silicon wafers, which bypass the purification steps necessary for the recovery of high purity silicon and glass. The simple and scalable dismantling SPWR process was tested on several PV brands, and advantageously offered clean glass, which was made available to relevant industries to evaluate the value of the recovered material.
PV Recycling Program PVRP