It's usually cheaper because the full costs of mining/extracting new aren't being paid by the producer or the first user. In other words, it's not really cheaper, it's just being paid by somebody other than the person buying it. Coal is a good example. Who's paying for the costs associated with mercury deposited in the oceans from burning coal, which in turn makes it so we can't eat some fish very often? Who's paying for the medical costs of people who do eat too much mercury contaminated fish? It's not the people buying coal, I guarantee it. It's a cost they are generating, though. It's a kind of backdoor communism by forcing other people to pay your costs.
Who pays for the costs associated with the lead and other heavy contaminants in solar panels? Not the producer.
What's the cost of lead in solar panels?
It's not the cost of the lead, it's trying to remove it from the silicon, and re-purifying the silicon so you can use it for new panels. Any contamination in the silicon renders it useless, and the energy required to burn off contamination isn't free.
Assuming you could even really recover anything useful from the panels, there's all kind of leftover materials like lead, plastics, coatings, etc. that are never going to be cost effective to recover anything from, assuming you even could. Those have to be contained and disposed of somewhere - usually in a third world country where they're just thrown into rivers or left to leach into the ground.
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