Solar industry feeling the heat over disposal of 80M panels

Of course the fossil fuel industry is completely silent on their established practice of recycling 0% of their emissions resulting from burning their fuels (and never mind the process of creating, exploiting, transporting those). It's an extremely dirty business in comparison. Pump up a few million tonnes of oil, ship it half way across the globe, refine it using insane amounts of energy, burn and dump the toxic waste that remains and truck the refined goods to its final destination. If you spell it out like that it drives the notion home just how dirty all of that business is.

Solar panels are mostly glass with some small amounts of metals. We're talking kilo grams vs. grams here. Most of that sits completely inert on your roof for decades with zero issues. It doesn't run of with rain water. You can collect that water and drink it or water your plants. It's perfectly safe. Some of the trace amounts of the non glass stuff is potentially toxic. That's what we're talking about. A lump of coal is way more toxic. Where do you think coal plants dump their ashes? Right: landfills! What do you think oil refineries do with the crap that remains after the refinement process. Or the raw materials like cobalt that they consume in the process. It's fine. Nobody gives a shit. In the grand scheme of what else they do it's not even worth talking about. The outrage regarding this is highly selective. Solar panels: OMG!!, coal: yawn who cares.

The issue of what to do with solar panels is an extremely minor issue in comparison. And of course it is potentially addressed 100% by investing in recycling processes. Any suggestion that landfills are the only solution here is basically horse shit. The cost benefit analysis of recycling vs. using landfills is a bit of a thing in terms of cost / benefit of course. But arguably, the recovered materials are valuable commodities. Like copper for example. So there's that. But compared to what we dump in landfills already, it's basically a negligible issue.

Articles like this are of course not independent journalists raising innocent (or even remotely original) questions but billions of dollars of lobby money financed by the fossil fuel industry hard at work rehashing myths, half truths, and other horse shit. All of this has just 1 goal: delaying the inevitable for financial gains (at the cost of our planet). The goal here is manipulating public policy and public sentiments in order to delay the moment when they have to pull the plug on their sunk investments related to burning coal, refining oil, selling petrol, etc. Worth calling out just how manipulative the fossil fuel sector is. The tobacco lobby are absolute saints in comparison.

Recover the silver from the panels and bury them. Landfills are great. They keep our garbage out of the ocean. We build parks on top of them and most people don’t even know they’re there. They’re certainly not struggling to find space for a landfill in Australia.

The article talks about 100,000 metric tons of solar panel waste generated in Australia over some unspecified timeframe. (They mention 2035, so I assume they are talking about solar panels that will serve their useful life in the two decades before 2035?)

Meanwhile Australia generates a million tons of waste each year, from single use plastics alone. And also every year, 130,000 tons of plastic makes it to the ocean.

https://www.dcceew.gov.au/environment/protection/waste/publi...

I don't get it. A 20yo panel doesn't suddenly stop making power. It's just making less power. No need to throw it away when the 20y mark hits.

The majority of these panels are still producing electricity, 2035 is a ways off.

The most effective way to dispose of them is to keep them right where they are.

I presume the 2035 number comes from the depreciation plan, which mostly depends on tax rules set by the relevant taxation departments (you mostly depreciate capital as fast as possible to claim it as an expense as soon as possible: profit today is worth more than profit tomorrow).

The reasons you would recycle them are:

1: availability of land is a constraint (unlikely in much of Australia where you would install fields of panels).

2: power lines are capacity limited (unlikely during morning or evening when power most valuable?)

3: destroyed by weather.

4: maintenance costs exceed dollars gained by selling the power (+ selling stability + selling availability + other).

Hopefully they send the panels to a third world country (if they have some life left in them). Put a refundable deposit on each panel with an ID to ensure they are not just unethically dumped: a high enough deposit to ensure it is worth returning them, but low enough that it isn’t worth stealing them just to get the deposit.

I don’t know much about the industry, but being green means acknowledging the fundamental economics, not being ignorant.

The high volume of waste might actually be a plus here, since it would more likely to be practical and economical to develop a custom recycling/disposal process for them. Also, since solar panels are so large, sorting shouldn't be too big of a challenge.

At this point, I'm pretty convinced that anything that's coming out about renewables is just propaganda by the oil companies to try and avoid their inevitable removal from use as an energy source. It would be really cool if gov't could regulate fossil fuels abilities to make claims about its own products and other products in a way that puts in perspective just how much damage they've continued to do with their lies...