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Comment by bradfa | Hacker News Reader

Yes. The vast majority of a solar panel is glass and metals. Both are easily recyclable.

The solar cells are tightly glued to the glass. Glass is easily recyclable but obtaining it and cleaning it is nearly impossible. It's also treated with antimony to increase its durability which limits how you can handle it. About 90% of all glass in solar panels has been landfilled.

A minor point anyways. Glass is not exactly a precious resource.

The most valuable parts are obviously the silver (about 50% of a panel's scrap value despite being 0.1% by weight), aluminum (about 20% of value), silicon (about 15%), and copper wiring (about 10%).

We are only just beginning to figure out techniques to reclaim the silver using thermal heating and chemical leaching techniques

So at the moment it’s not really recyclable.

Still way better than the amount of concrete et. al. needed to build any traditional power plant.

Unfortunately. And this isn't even getting into batteries.

The material itself is not the problem I’m concerned about. The metal gets doped and transformed into configurations that could be hard to be unmade.

No, it goes in a shredder you’d use for e-waste disposal and ~90% of the material can be reused.

https://www.epa.gov/hw/solar-panel-recycling

https://www.firstsolar.com/Solutions/Recycling

> One kilogram of First Solar’s semiconductor material can be recycled 41 times over, which translates into a use time of more than 1,200 years.

A 1 square meter solar panel that weighs around 10kg contains under half a kg of actual doped silicon photovoltaic cells, with the remaining >95% being mainly aluminium framing, glass to cover the cells, and some backing material and wiring, all of which are trivially recyclable. So even if the doped silicon wasn't recyclable (which it is with a little more effort than the other materials) that's hardly the majority of the material that goes into making a solar panel.

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