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Comment by jlmorton | Hacker News Reader

It's really bizarre that whenever solar is mentioned, someone chimes in with some claim about toxic materials in the panels, yet rarely do you hear these complaints about other ubiquitous products with hazardous materials, like televisions, laptops, fluorescent light bulbs, microwaves, or anything else.

The recovery rate for solar panels in developed countries is already close to 100%. Very few people are going to simply dispose of them in the trash, because they don't fit in the trash, and the contractors they work with are not going to dump them in the woods.

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This is a common astroturfing technique.

"We might be replacing one problem with another. We need to move on from toxic solar to some unknown fuel of the future."

Notice the classic FUD sowing, ambiguity, and of course an oblique reference to some as-yet-developed economic synthetic fuel.

It's fair to say we will have to replace this with something not developed yet. It's honest and if you are scared by it others will come up with that solution.

I' ll offer a guess at a solution.. the next generation of power sources will be organically based and breakdown into non-toxic material and solar will be a part of that.

Solar panels are even better: they don't break down into anything, ever. They are completely inert, pre-vitrified from the factory and guaranteed to hold their shape for millions of years.

And when they're old and lost most of their efficiency, one can still use them in less demanding applications. Example: take old panels from households or industrial buildings and use them on parking lots for services or lighting. To a certain extent, the same applies to batteries too.

I’ve also noticed an ironic overlap between the “solar is toxic” and “windmills can’t be recycled” crowd with being pro-nuclear

> the contractors they work with are not going to dump them in the woods

They will if that's the cheapest option to get rid of them. Westinghouse dumped PCB-laden oil and transformers in the woods and that is still being cleaned up decades later.

30-40+ years ago they would flush it down the drain too. There are unscrupulous contractors out the wazoo, but today you will get your license yanked so fast.

> The recovery rate for solar panels in developed countries is already close to 100%. Very few people are going to simply dispose of them in the trash, because they don't fit in the trash, and the contractors they work with are not going to dump them in the woods.

The garbage will get shipped to corrupt third-world countries, then they can be safely dumped in the woods/water.

Not in Europe. There is also a market for these modules in developing countries. Used up modules are still working good enough for, say, remote areas in Asia or Africa. Why throw a working, for free, module away if you can use it?

It is not bizarre if everyone keeps bring up the same issue.

In your area they will be picked up and shipped to another country with lower environmental standards for disassembling.

These are some of the chemicals of concern: cadmium telluride, copper indium selenide, cadmium gallium (di)selenide, copper indium gallium (di)selenide, hexafluoroethane, lead, and polyvinyl fluoride. Additionally, silicon tetrachloride, a byproduct of producing crystalline silicon, is highly toxic

Silicon tetrachloride being a “highly toxic” “byproduct of producing crystalline silicon” is a new astroturfing mantra I’ve seen repeated lately. Too bad it’s recycled as part of the process (and is useful on its own for making high purity optical fibers) or solar enemies might have a point!

It is an intermediate product, not a waste product.

There was a highly publicized story in 2008 about Chinese silicon companies dumping it illegally. Ever since it's been repeatedly invoked as anti-solar ammunition. It's like constantly warning about melamine poisoning from milk because an unscrupulous company did that before too.

Additionally, in 2011 China set standards requiring that companies recycle at least 98.5 percent of their silicon tetrachloride waste.

It's fairly easy and cost effective to recycle once you have the infrastructure in place. It seems most of the pollution reports are from before the mandate and also when precursors were way cheaper relative to the final product.

SiCl4 is also entirely non-persistent in the environment. It reacts vigorously with water.

I don't understand the mechanism that hexafluoroethane would be produced by a solar panel.

I guess, that gas might be produced as an impurity during manufacturing, but wouldn't that be at the factory? That seems like something that would be really easy to monitor and regulate because fabs are expensive and rare.

could you explain more about the hexafluoroethane?

It been used as an etchant few decades ago for microchips.

You don't need to etch solar cells for any reason.

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