This is one thing i never understand about this type of thing. The things they need for new panels are all concentrated in this waste, why can't they use this as a source where it is a high concentration, rather than mine it at a low concentration?
It's difficult to recover the materials from the old panels, and right now it's cheaper to simply mine new. It's like plastics - sure, we could recycle most plastics but it's simply cheaper to gather new materials.
That's going to change at some point, but who knows when that will be.
What's going to change is that we are going to lose the ability to manufacture or put into use solar panels due to the rapid drop in IQ and the decline in educational standards. We are headed for a Dark Age.
True. The good thing about a well made panel is they will still produce, albeit at a substantial loss in output, for many years after they are "obsolete."
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.
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.
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