What happens when solar panels die?

There is some good news in this article too:

> In the UK and Europe, solar panels are covered by the Waste from Electrical and Electronic Equipment directive, or WEEE. The rules oblige supplying companies to collect and recycle discarded panels, or to shoulder the cost for another entity to do so. It means that, hopefully, we won’t see tons more panels being dumped to landfills, but also means it’s often going to be more economical to send working panels to recycling rather than repurposing them.

So at least the panels aren’t just ending up in landfills but are actively recycled. I don’t understand this sentence though: it’s often going to be more economical to send working panels to recycling rather than repurposing them

If a reseller or manufacturer has to pay for the recycling of a panel I would assume it’s much cheaper to repurpose them instead of recycle them. What am I missing here?

> ”You have these big pension funds looking at this from a spreadsheet,” looking for ways to better maximise their investment. The end result is that all of these otherwise fine panels are junked. “When you think about the embedded carbon of bringing [the panels] over [from China]” said Burnell “and then they go into the waste stream [...] seems mad.”

The throwing away of functional solar panels feels criminal to me, even though I can see the “business case” for it.