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Why recycling solar panels is harder than you might think

Why recycling solar panels is harder than you might think

5 comments

·July 14, 2025
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femto

Macquarie University has had some success with using microwave heating to separate panels for recycling. I gather (from speaking to the people involved) that the same annealing process can also be used to rejuvenate old panels, boosting their output and allowing reuse, but the effect is short lived.

https://createdigital.org.au/accidental-discovery-boosts-sol...

https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2025/06/23/lithium-uni...

naniwaduni

> As an electrical engineer who has studied many aspects of renewable energy, recycling solar panels seems like a smart idea,

Actually, hold that thought for a moment, why would that seem like a smart idea? Almost everything is "harder than you might think" to recycle. It's always been, for good reason, the least preferred of the "three R's", and its cultural salience has been an utter failure of messaging. There are only like, a handful of materials that it's been economically reasonable to run large-scale recycling operations for, and solar panels are far from a coherent material that can be washed and melted down.

jandrese

Given the long life and low mass of solar panels it's not clear to me that recycling is a noticeable environmental win. I'm also surprised that they list the landfill cost as $1-$5 per panel. That's extremely expensive unless they're calculating the labor and gas cost of removing a single panel and driving it out to the dump one at a time.

Vvector

I calculate it at 52 cents per panel (40 lbs a panel)

Source for the cost:

https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/74124.pdf one study found that disposal tipping fees at non-hazardous landfills ($26/U.S. ton) can cost less than $1 per module and less than $5 per module at hazardous waste landfills ($175/U.S. ton)

1970-01-01

The big problem is glue. Right now, we have no better (cheap, fast, durable) method to bond glass to plastic without using glue that lasts much longer than the life of the panel. As nobody wants to buy a panel that needs gasket maintenance, we're stuck with glue (pun intended) holding us back from solar panels being easy to recycle.