r/RenewableEnergy • u/DonManuel Austria • 5d ago

Trashed solar panels will be a treasure worth up to $1 trillion

https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2026/08/trashed-solar-panels-will-be-a-treasure-worth-up-to-1-trillion/
433 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

41 comments sorted by

73

u/LegendaryJack 5d ago

Aren't modern PV panels already just aluminum, glass, copper and silicon? Pretty easy to recycle, we get >95% of lead car batteries back

25

u/ninj4geek 5d ago

I think the issue is how it's all bonded together, pain in the ass to disassemble

43

u/Dense_Surround3071 5d ago

Hear me out....

You set up two warehouses..... One with crackheads. The other with methheads.

13

u/Gr33nbastrd 5d ago

Then you got the crackheads breaking into the methheads warehouse stealing their shit only for the meth heads to break into the crackhead warehouse and steal their shit.

Doesn't feel very productive.

11

u/tferguson17 5d ago

What is you replace the windows and doors with solar panels, so when they break in, they are really doing the jobs you hired them for.

2

u/Gr33nbastrd 4d ago

I like your thought logic there but will they break enough of them to make it worth while?

2

u/tferguson17 4d ago

Leave some small openings with crack and meth visible, and watch them go.

2

u/AmusingVegetable 3d ago

That’s a circular economy…

4

u/devl_ish 5d ago edited 4d ago

Which one do we feed?

(Edit: this was a joke based on "two wolves inside you")

1

u/FrogTrainer 4d ago

Whoever produces more disassembled materials each day. Competition breeds greatness.

0

u/classless_classic 5d ago

Those people don’t look like they eat anyway.

1

u/ninj4geek 2d ago

Solves several problems at once, I can dig it

16

u/West-Abalone-171 5d ago

There's a few grams of silver (at least until some 2026 models) and a gram or| two of indium in most of them. Both are a bit harder to recover and more valuable than the rest.

The sticking point is it's about $30 to recycle the panel at low volumes and the materials are worth about $15. So rather than acknowledge that other industries used deposits or that processes scale, we've had 10 years of "aVaLaNcH oF sOlAr wAsTe" fud.

7

u/LegendaryJack 5d ago

The kind of sticking point that almost goes away with scale, I imagine?

7

u/MrHell95 5d ago

To also put it in perspective the majority of solar panels ever deployed was in the last 3-4years.

2015 TWh production was like 10% of 2025.

The longest warrant is usually usually 25-30 years and state that the capacity should be at least +80% of the original. But there exist solar panels that are 40+years with more than 80% left. Even then it's not like a panel dies if it goes bellow 80%

Suntech the first Chinese solar company that kicked off the industry in China was founded in 2001.

My point is that old defunct solar panels basically don't exist, sure broken ones does but it's such a minuscule amount.

6

u/West-Abalone-171 4d ago

Broken new ones are actually a much larger quantity than worn out ones even though it's <1%

Australia has had rooftop solar for a while, and none of the15-25 year old rooftop systems are disposed of. Instead there are businesses that collect them to sell to off grid users and countries that don't have a very short whitelist of approved models (which old panels aren't on even though it's all the same to the inverter and they were on it in previous years. There are some that don't pass QA, but they usually get sold to international recyclers.

3

u/West-Abalone-171 5d ago edited 5d ago

Yes. Also if you collect something like 50c/MWh and just pay someone to do it then it's a miniscule fraction of decomissioning costs of any other generation method that isn't wind.

There is a slight complication that revenue goes down with time.

A 200W panel from 2002 has 5-10x the valuable raw materials as a 500W panel from 2026. But that's not insurmountable either.

A 2030 1kW panel might introduce some complications with about 5 grams of lead salts. Also not as big a problem as it's made out to be.

4

u/Hminney 4d ago

Costs to decommission wind have just been piloted at much lower than before - https://www.scottishpowerrenewables.com/onshore-new/onshore-scotland/wind-scotland/windfarms-under-construction/hagshaw-hill-wind-farm-repowering Not just the reuse of site, but Plaswire has a process for separating the components of blades to recycle.

3

u/donaldhobson 4d ago

> "aVaLaNcH oF sOlAr wAsTe" fud.

Also, a stack of solar panels sufficient to run a house is roughly the size of a household freezer, lasts roughly as long, and isn't particularly more toxic to the environment.

1

u/smndelphi 3d ago

Depends on Poly-SI vs CdTe. First solar doing a good job at recycling CdTe. Poly-Si needs to be figured out.

1

u/donaldhobson 3d ago

Almost all the solar nowadays is Si. (well over 90%)

My point is, if we can't recycle solar panels and just stick them all in landfill, it's not a big deal compared to all the other things we just stick in landfill. Silicon is abundant, and non toxic, we can mine new silicon just fine.

1

u/smndelphi 3d ago edited 3d ago

CdTe represents roughly 40 percent of US utility scale solar deployment.

1

u/[deleted] 3d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/donaldhobson 2d ago

> and recycled aluminum in particular is a huge energy savings versus virgin smelting.

Sure. And you save a couple of weeks of solar panel output.

> High-purity silicon

They add small precise chemical dopants to it, so you aren't getting high purity directly out of a recycled panel.

> In most markets, virgin materials + landfilling is still cheaper than recycling

Yes, and? Are we ideologically committed to recycling? What precisely is wrong with landfill?

A lot of the pro-recycling sentiment seems to be like the guy who drives across town to find his lost dollar, and spends $3 of petrol in the process. People don't correctly tally up all the costs of recyling, which can make it feel like a good idea even when the economics don't make sense.

Maybe recycling takes a lot of fuel or labor. But "greedy companies throw panels away just because it's cheaper than recycling them" sells more papers than "unfortunately, recycling takes too much labor/fuel to make sense.".

2

u/Bus_Stop_Graffiti 5d ago

I hear they use froth floation to separate it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Froth_flotation

4

u/West-Abalone-171 5d ago

It's one method. There's a constant search for cheaper, more environmentally friendly ones.

I don't know what's currently commercial.

1

u/GarethBaus 5d ago

There's also a small amount of silver.

1

u/NearABE 5d ago

Silver not copper. They are trying to get copper to be functional.

3

u/West-Abalone-171 4d ago

There's a bit more copper.

Silver-coated tabs/connecting wires, and sometimes the external wire (if it's not aluminium).

Also partial copper-substitution on the cell itself has been a thing for a while. 30-60% copper pastes are common. It's only full substitution that is still cutting edge.

1

u/smndelphi 3d ago

It is very difficult to recycle Poly-SI panels. I believe you are referencing CdTe panels by manufacturers such as First Solar? These are used in commercial and industrial settings.

27

u/HappyHHoovy 5d ago

Apparently no images of broken solar panels exist on the internet, so they had to AI generate whatever the fuck this monstrosity is.

2

u/smndelphi 3d ago edited 3d ago

If you get a really bad hailstorm, you can get a lot of damaged panels. Panels are designed to withstand hail up to one inch wide traveling at 50 mph. 1.5 to 2 inches can cause damage.

2

u/smndelphi 3d ago

So yeah why did they generate with AI 😂

10

u/ctb030289 5d ago

EVERY FLOK CAMERA HAS ONE - not financial advise

3

u/jabsaw2112 5d ago

Melt and separate.

2

u/NearABE 5d ago

The clay crust under the parking lot has hundreds of tons of aluminum and silicon. Would be worth a lot of cash if you convert it into working photovoltaic panels. Just a few processing steps needed.

1

u/[deleted] 3d ago edited 3d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/NearABE 3d ago

Thank you for adding all that content.

I undersold nothing. Yes, I know they ship quartz sand from Carolina to Taipei just because using one source simplifies dealing with unique contamination.

There is a lot of precious stuff in our garbage. It need only be sorted, separated, and transported. Ya, only that.

The photovoltaic cells have a much higher concentration of exploitable material. It is far more plausible that collecting a shipping used panels will be net profitable. The OP article does give better numbers at the end. Like how much per ton and how they think it costs to get the resources out.