It’s literally sand!
The hard part is purifying it. Starting from already manufactured electronics seems like an uphill battle because the silicon is already contaminated with precisely those elements that need to be removed from it to control its electronic behaviour!
Also, I imagine it takes a lot of energy to go from "we found this on the beach" to "this is ultrapure silicon for use in solar cells". We have essentially unlimited aluminum too.
The purpose of recycled cans is saving energy and reducing pollution from extraction. I do wonder whether it's easier to start with glass from beverage bottles than from solar panels though.
Where one DOES want pure silica is in making the crucibles where silicon is melted. There's a particular mine in North Carolina (Spruce Pine) where this very pure silica is mined. We could make artificial pure silica, but this stuff is cheaper.
I thought the only sand shortage to speak of was the specific type required for making concrete, because wind-blown sand is too rounded off for producing strong concrete. So those endless dunes of wind-blown sand everyone envisions aren't applicable.
But when you intend to melt the sand I presume there's an abundant supply.
I mean, I get the value in recycling the panels. It's presumably easier to start with almost pure material than 60% pure. Still, if it were cheaper to start with a chunk of feldspar than an old panel, I don't think we'd have to worry about the lack of virgin materials.
Just because a resource exists nearby doesn't necessarily mean it can be harnessed economically or within the other constraints that the world and society imposes on us.
Silica mines are mostly (all?) surface mines, we don't explore anywhere into the crust to get it now because it isn't economical to do so. "Running out" of supply doesn't necessarily mean that the element doesn't exist, it could mean that it is inaccessible for other reasons -- like it could be the beach in front of someone's house, or a protected park.
Chances are that the process described in the article uses more resources and produces more pollution than simply starting from sand.
Of course, because the Earth won't be around forever. But we can dispose of a lot of stuff for a very long time, because the Earth is a really big place.
Geology is all about massive quantities of stuff just being left in piles and solidifying over millions of years. If the stuff isn't that toxic, this could happen to anthropogenic stuff too.
Beside that: if they can work out the economics of the process, why not? Waste disposal costs money which might shift the economics in their favour (as people would have to pay someone for disposal anyways, so they could as well pay the people who make new panels from old ones).
>>The German scientists said the cells were fabricated only with wafers relying on recycled silicon and that no commercial ultrapure silicon was added during the manufacturing process.
>>The performance of the first trial PERC cells was tested and the devices were found to achieve a power conversion efficiency of 19.7%. “This is below the efficiency of today’s premium PERC solar cells, which have an efficiency of around 22.2 percent, but it is certainly above that of the solar cells in the old, discarded modules,”
Environmental destruction is a huge problem and usable sand is a limited resource and often in delicate environments. It’s not the 19th century anymore—people today are more aware that taking resources has consequences.
This may have been somewhat more true in the past, but I believe the energy payback period is now less than 24 months, on a PV device that should last over 20 years.
We must pay attention to weighing up the relative costs to environmental destruction by one cause (production and disposal of PV) against its most common alternative (continued fossil fuel usage).
But maybe this technique makes the payback go from 24 months to 22 months. Maybe even just to 23.5 months! It’s still progress!
Nobody here is arguing that. FUD is a real thing. Be careful not give them ammunition.
FUD isn't even an applicable term.