silver

Recycling solar panels

September 2, 2025 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

The use of solar energy has been growing by leaps and bounds in recent years. It is the fastest growing source of energy in the U.S. Solar panels have a useful life of about 25 to 30 years and there are growing numbers that have been around that long. They contain valuable materials, including silver, copper, and aluminum, as well as some hazardous materials, so just committing them to landfills is a bad idea from many perspectives.

Recycling solar panels is a relatively new but increasingly important business. At the present time, roughly 90% of panels that have lost their efficiency due to age or that are defective end up in landfills because that is much cheaper than recycling them. The best option is to reuse them where their reduced efficiency is acceptable. This includes in developing nations or in other places that are able to make use of the lower power in exchange for lower installation cost.

Estimates are that the area covered by solar panels in the U.S. that are due to retire by 2030 would cover about 3,000 football fields. The amount of potential waste contained in all of those panels is quite substantial.

There are new companies dedicated to solar panel recycling such as one called SolarCycle that are trying to change this situation. It is much more expensive to have SolarCycle take away solar panels than to send them to landfills, but it is difficult to find landfills that accept panels and many clients want to minimize the environmental impact of their old panels.

Only 10% of retired solar panels are currently recycled. That that is likely to change as economics and regulations continue to evolve.

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As Millions of Solar Panels Age Out, Recyclers Hope to Cash In

Photo, posted November 23, 2024, courtesy of Mussi Katz via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

Deep sea mining

August 19, 2024 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Deep sea mining is the extraction of minerals from the ocean floor at depths greater than 660 feet and as much as 21,000 feet below the surface. Active or extinct hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor create sulfide deposits which collect metals such as silver, gold, copper, manganese, cobalt, and zinc. This forms polymetallic nodules – potato-sized rocklike deposits containing these valuable minerals. There are literally trillions of these things scattered over wide areas of ocean floor. The largest of these deposits are in the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and Mexico in the Clarion Clipperton Fracture Zone.

Mining companies argue that land-based sources for valuable metals are running out and are critically needed for green technologies like batteries for electric vehicles and manufacturing solar panels and wind turbines. They also claim that mining in the deep sea will be less environmentally damaging than land-based mining.

The deep sea is viewed by many as kind of a watery desert but there are actually diverse and rich ecosystems down there. Most of the animals living in the depths are tiny, but that doesn’t make them any less important. Many can live for a very long time. Some invertebrates live for thousands of years.

There are currently no commercial deep sea mining operations underway. Many countries have outlawed them.

The deep seas are the last mostly unexplored part of the Earth. Deep sea mining will unquestionably be highly destructive to these environments. We don’t really know what the impact of widespread deep sea mining might be, but the world continues to edge ever closer to allowing it to happen.

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Can We Mine the World’s Deep Ocean Without Destroying It?

Photo, posted March 30, 2018, courtesy of the NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

Recycling Solar Panels | Earth Wise

September 29, 2023 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Solar panels generally have a useful life of around 20 to 25 years. The great majority of deployed panels have been installed fairly recently, so they have a long way to go. But the growth in solar technology dates back to the 1990s, so there are growing number of panels that have already or are shortly coming to their end-of-life.

Today, roughly 90% of solar panels that have lost their efficiency due to age, or that are defective, end up in landfills because recycling them is too expensive. Nevertheless, solar panels contain valuable materials, including silver, copper, and crystalline silicon, as well as lower-value aluminum and glass.

The rapid growth of solar technology means that in the coming years, large numbers of retired solar panels will enter the waste stream. The area covered by solar panels that are due to be retired by 2030 in the U.S. alone would cover about 3,000 football fields. Clearly, more cost-effective recycling methods are sorely needed.

Engineers at the University of New South Wales in Sydney Australia have developed a new, more effective way of recycling solar panels that can recover silver at high efficiency. The panel frames and glass are removed leaving just the solar cells themselves. The cells are then crushed and sieved in a vibration container that effectively separates 99% of the materials contained in them.

Silver is the most valuable material contained in solar cells. The Australian researchers estimate that between 5 and 10 thousand tons of silver could potentially be recycled from retired solar panels by the year 2050. But even the other materials contained in solar panels are well worth recovering if it can be done cost-effectively.

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New environmentally friendly solar panel recycling process helps recover valuable silver

Photo, posted November 22, 2008, courtesy of Oregon Department of Transportation via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

Recycling Solar Panels | Earth Wise

October 1, 2020 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

It is inevitable that the things we make and use eventually outlive their useful lives and become waste that we have to deal with. Solar panels, despite their impressively long lifetime, can’t escape this general principle. As pioneering solar panels near the end of their 30-year electronic lives, they could well become the world’s next big wave of e-waste.

According to the International Renewable Energy Agency, nearly 90 million tons of solar panels will have reached their end of life by the year 2050, resulting in about 7 million tons of new solar e-waste per year.

Solar photovoltaic deployment has grown at unprecedented rates in recent years. The total global installed capacity is about 600 GW today; projections are that there will be 1,600 GW by 2030 and 4,500 GW by 2050.

Solar panels contain valuable materials, including silver and high-purity silicon. But current recycling procedures are not cost-effective. Only about 10% of panels are currently recycled in the U.S. The rest go to landfills or are shipped overseas to become another country’s problem.

Before solar waste becomes a major problem, the industry needs to better address the issue. Strategies include improving the design of panels to align with recycling capabilities as well as developing new recycling methods that can more efficiently extract and purify the valuable materials in the panels. Industry researchers are also looking into ways to repair and resell panels that are still in good condition and to repurpose old panels for less demanding functions like e-bike charging stations and housing complexes.

Like most things, solar panels do fail over time and with a rapidly growing number of them in the world, we need to figure out how to avoid them adding to the world’s problems.

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Solar Panels Are Starting to Die. Will We be Able to Recycle the E-Waste?

Photo, posted January 6, 2006, courtesy of Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Recycling And Olympic Medals

March 23, 2017 By EarthWise

Organizers of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games announced in February that all the Olympic medals for the games will be made from recycled materials. The strategic roadmap for the games, laid out in the document “Olympic Agenda 2020”, specifically calls for the inclusion of sustainability in every aspect of the games.