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| Economy |
| Solar Panels Are Starting to Die. What Will We Do With The Megatons Of Toxic Trash? |
| 2020-09-01 |
| American Experiment via Instapundit Most people seem to believe that wind and solar panels produce no waste and have no negative environmental impacts. Unfortunately, these people are wrong. ...By 2050, the International Renewable Energy Agency projects that up to 78 million metric tons of solar panels will have reached the end of their life, and that the world will be generating about 6 million metric tons of new solar e-waste annually. This is an enormous amount of waste. For context, the amount of nuclear waste created from generating electricity in the United States for the last five decades is about 90,000 metric tons. During this time, nuclear power has provided nearly 20 percent of the nation’s electricity. This means that solar panels are expected to generate 866 times more waste in the next 30 years than nuclear power has generated in the last 50. And unlike nuclear waste, which is safely stored on site, nobody knows what will happen to these solar panels at the end of their useful lifetime because solar panels are not easily recycled. ..."Solar panels are composed of photovoltaic (PV) cells that convert sunlight to electricity. When these panels enter landfills, valuable resources go to waste. And because solar panels contain toxic materials like lead that can leach out as they break down, landfilling also creates new environmental hazards." ...One reason so few solar panels are recycled is because it isn’t cost effective. According to Grist: "Tao and his colleagues estimate that a recycler taking apart a standard, 60-cell silicon panel can get about $3 for the recovered aluminum, copper, and glass. Vanderhoof, meanwhile, says that the cost of recycling that panel in the U.S. is anywhere between $12 and $25 — after transportation costs, which "oftentimes equal the cost to recycle." At the same time, in states that allow it, it typically costs less than a dollar to dump a solar panel in a solid waste landfill." "We believe the big blind spot in the U.S. for recycling is that the cost far exceeds the revenue," Meng said. "It’s on the order of a 10-to-1 ratio." |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |
| #2 Arithmetic wins again! |
| Posted by: SteveS 2020-09-01 18:52 |
| #1 ..and then there are those electric batteries from the 'green' vehicles. Oh, and having to bury all those windmill blades when they wear out. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2020-09-01 18:32 |