Solar panels include toxic heavy metals. It will be a disaster to put them in landfills. Unfortunately, they're difficult to recycle. By some accounts it costs $20-40 to recycle a panel and there's only about $2-4 worth of materials recovered from the panels. They're not built for recycling, and the process does not have economies of scale. So it costs $20 for one panel, or $2000 for 100 panels, etc...
Millions of solar panels will go defunct every year in the not so distant future. Of course, there's no project in place to recycle them. Why? Because the green energy industry is every bit as greedy and "bad" as the petroleum industry. Cost to recycle solar panels will probably be foisted off onto tax payers, or maybe onto consumers of the panels, which makes sense. It effectively increases the lifetime cost of a panel by 25%+. Huge solar farms will be 25% more expensive, etc...
EV batteries are worse than solar panels from this perspective. The latest Tesla batteries are an integrated assembly. The batteries are embedded in a polymer foam adhesive matrix, apparently. They can't even be repaired. Consequently recycling them will be a nightmare. It will be a lot worse than solar panels. There will be a hefty "recycling" fee attached to EVs in the not so distant future.
It's likely that the recyclers will cheat, just like plastic recycling facilities do today. EV batteries and dead solar panels will just pile up in poor countries just like e-waste does today.
No comments:
Post a Comment