Peter Clack
Landfill is becoming the default graveyard for the fading renewable-energy green dream.
Millions of solar panels are already hitting their end-of-life cycle, and the world is completely unprepared for the toxic avalanche due in 2030. By 2050, the International Renewable Energy Agency says it will get much worse, with more than 200 million tonnes of cumulative solar panel waste globally. Plus, there will be additional tens of millions of tonnes of decommissioned wind turbine components. Turbine blades are virtually indestructible.
The industry has claimed solar panels and turbines were ‘95% recyclable’. Technically, they are—because they are made of glass, aluminium, and copper. But the reality is a different story. In the US, it costs roughly $20 to $30 to properly disassemble and recycle a single panel, compared to just $1 to $5 to dump it in a landfill.
Because there is little financial incentive to disassemble and recycle parts, around 90% of decommissioned panels in the US and a large share of turbine blades worldwide go straight into the ground.
These devices are highly complex. A solar panel is an industrial ‘sandwich’ bound tightly by heavy polymers. Extracting the microscopic amounts of valuable silver and high-purity silicon requires energy-intensive chemical and thermal processing.
When crushed or left to fracture in landfills, heavy metals like lead and cadmium leach into surrounding soil and groundwater, turning ‘clean energy’ into a multi-generational hazardous waste problem.
The crisis is accelerating faster than models ever predicted. As solar cells degrade and newer, cheaper panels hit the market, consumers and solar farms are ripping out functional systems a decade early to repower and upgrade.
The dream of renewable energy from sunlight and wind has, in reality, created an endless loop of unrecyclable industrial trash.
Green energy is far from green, if I remember correctly only 5% of the lithium in a used battery is recyclable, add in the cost to reprocess it and it costs more than starting fresh. The gas used in wind turbines for the circuit breakers is called SF6 and has 23,500 times greater global warming potential (GWP) than CO2,
Noticeably all the highly-vociferous ‘Climate change’ advocates are nowhere to be found…
One wonders why.
Climate Change Zealots and Green Recyclable Energy nuts, are creating the very problems that their solution were designed to prevent happening.
“it costs roughly $20 to $30 to properly disassemble and recycle a single panel, compared to just $1 to $5 to dump it in a landfill.”
solar panels lose about 1% of capacity per year so after 20 years they still output about 80% of their original capacity. Why would you send them to the tip?