Solar Recycling

Green technology is the way of the future, as it will provide consumers and businesses a cleaner way of completing essential tasks while having far less of a negative impact on the environment. Green energy, in the forms of solar, wind, geo-thermal and hydro will soon gain a bigger foothold in electric grids across the world. There is a question that goes along with this new technology though, and an important one at that: since everything that humans make eventually falls apart, what will happen when clean energy creating substances become too old to be productive?

There is a natural life to all things, and photovoltaic cells are no different. There is a problem when the end-life phase occurs in the solar industry, that problem is that there is no true way to completely naturally dispose or recycle the product. In Europe, where the flair for solar power has taken off, steps are being taken to change this situation and create a “double green” industry. The idea of double green is that a product utilizes green technology, and can also be recycled to create another green product. First Solar, a company that makes photovoltaic cells has a system for recycling the solar panels that it builds. It has created a collection and recycling program for old and tired panels. The process of recycling involves shredding the module, then crushing it to break the bonds that have formed. From there the glass is removed, as are semi-conductor materials; the glass is cleaned up and the semi-conductor material leaches into large drums for 4-6 weeks. At the end of the process, the recycling process is incredibly efficient in recycling nearly all of the portions of the original module, with nearly 90% of the glass being reused and 95% of the semi-conductor material reused for future cells.

This process mainly happens in Europe however, where solar is an up-and-coming way of producing power. In the United States, there is currently no recycling program devoted specifically to photovoltaic cells, and they are usually disposed of under the regulations for hazardous waste. At the moment this is not a terrible problem due to the lack of initiative by politicians to create tax incentives that would help the solar industry grow at a rate where such recycling legislation would be needed.