Plastics are differen because changing petroleum to plasticnis very well defined. There isn't additional refining afaik. My question is why cant we treat crushed up panels as ore and put it through a similar process?
It's easier (relatively) to get a metal or material from ore because you're typically trying to get an uncontaminated or moderately contaminated singular material from a matrix of rock or other material that you can remove. Even that isn't easy, for example gold requires lots of materials such as mercury (old processes) or borax in a cupelle to burn off the impurities and get the gold. It's a costly and wasteful process, and you end up with lots of crap to dispose of.
Take the three panels in the picture. Each of these is an amorphous silicon cell built in a traditional manner. There are metals connecting the individual planes together, plus plastics, other glass materials, screws, wire, lead, possibly silver, tin, copper, or even cadmium. There may be glues and coatings in between layers of glass and silicon. You'd literally have to have a special process for each type of panel. There's really not enough material in each one to be worth recovering, and reducing each of the metals contained within may not even be possible depending on how they alloyed themselves. And there's no telling who even made these things and what chemical processes they used.
Point being is that these require substantial recovery of individual materials before recovery of base materials can begin - if you even can. While there are panels that contain lower or supposedly no "toxic" materials, you still have to put them somewhere when their life is up - just like the wind turbine blades that simply get buried when they are at the end of their life.
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