The truth about why solar panels aren’t recycled? Visit https://brilliant.org/undecided to sign up for free. And also, the first 200 people will get 20% off their annual premium membership. Thanks to a 70% drop in price since 2010 and plenty of government subsidies, solar panels have become an integral part of the utility grid, as well as many home rooftops. However, this renewable energy technology isn’t all sunshine. There’s a potential tsunami of panels that will be nearing their end-of-life in the coming years. That fact has concerned many people, as the vast majority of panels here in the U.S. aren’t recycled. Why is that and what happens to these panels at the end of their service life? Is it even possible to recycle solar panels? There’s some interesting advances there that we have to talk about. Let’s see if we can come to a decision on this.
Watch The Reality of Carbon Capture https://youtu.be/HrRq2lzQb08?list=PLnTSM-ORSgi7cadIj6qpCWkg-tPzN1sgj
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Do you think solar panel recycling will catch up to the coming wave of solar panel waste? Visit https://brilliant.org/undecided to sign up for free. And also, the first 200 people will get 20% off their annual premium membership.
If you liked this video, check out: The Reality of Carbon Capture https://youtu.be/HrRq2lzQb08?list=PLnTSM-ORSgi7cadIj6qpCWkg-tPzN1sgj
i think its a riot that you done convinced alot of ppl to go solar. and like befor…afterwards you thought about the abundance of junk to deal with later.
Surely ecotards that put these on their roof should be forced to pay for disposal. Polluter pays.
I had a massive whack of deja-vu. I thought I already watched this video. And I have. The channel "just have a think" has made this video already only 3 weeks ago.
Just wanted to say thanks for putting the sponsor ad at the END of the video. It's infuriating to pay for Premium and still get ads in the middle of videos. When it's at the end I let it play as appreciation.
I guess one of the realities in life is you will never fly in an aeroplane designed by a committee / authority as they are by their very nature a failure – most of the manufacturers ( IE China ) are not regulated by those regulations and while its true that some countries / states have some effective import regulations the approach at best a complete confusion of regulations with multiple overlaps – all of those have a cost to the taxpayer – its easy to have a startup company with a few robots and some PR but how many of those actually bring solid results without taxpayer funding ? – lead acid batteries are much simpler things to recycle so the analogy does not stack up – as humans we need to face up to reality – " The gorilla in the room " – going green is not as simple or cost effective as it seems – that does not mean we should give up on it but maybe just lower our expectations ……..
Spent $6K building my own 2KW off-grid system which powered my home for 17 years including a home-based business for 12 years of that 17-year span entirely off grid aside from line-of-sight cellular wifi connection for communications. Battery bank #1 (six 6-volt Rolls Surrette deep cycle wet-cell batteries) lasted 14 years. Replacement battery bank of eight 6-volt Rolls Surrette three years ago are still in service and all PV panels are still in service, the entire time keeping everything operating in home and office through each and every local coop grid-supplied power system outages (which were numerous and sometimes lasted for days during winter storms). No regrets and convinced it has been worth investment and worth future recycling cost impact too.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention the local power coop wanted to charge $10K to run single-phase power to my remote, rural home without cost pay-back via billing deductions after installation. Too much for such undependable, expensive service.
Congrats on passing 1M subscribers, Matt 🙂
People will mine tons of rock to recover impure silver. Silver must be reclaimed. The process to make silicon from sand can accept solar panels with the Al frame and junction boxes removed. The problem is the narrow minded outlook of metallurgical grade silicon arc furnace companies to modify their processes and the fact that there are not enough panels or wind turbine blades to make this recycling a value process yet.
Panels are nontoxic enough (Not nontoxic, just nontoxic enough) and lightweight enough that we could literally dump them into fragile stream watersheds and it would cause a negligible environmental impact compared to their benefits. No recycling is necessary. Landfills are perfectly fine as a means of disposal. This entire "wave of EOL solar panel waste" concern is a fossil fuel industry stalking horse. Every dose of concern harms our environmental future – we don't "need" to do these things. We don't currently insist that existing coal miners bury as much biochar as they harvest in coal/oil/gas, to push a comparable standard back at them. 85 million hypothetical metric tons of waste is a tiny fraction of what was pulled out of a mine as overburden to make these panels, so you may as well argue against making them at all. We create more waste than that during the production of many different appliances every year – nobody is raising the issue of clothes washer/dryer recycling as some kind of urgent existential need. Because putting roadblocks in the way of everybody doing their laundry doesn't directly benefit a $2 trillion industry.
Well-meaning environmentalists who are willing to discuss concerns about anything, no matter how negligible, will be the death of all of us by global warming. But at least we won't be using plastic straws.
Why isn’t the glass powder subjected an electrolysis process, like a reverse electroplating to recover the metal components?
"Required Investment." Idea: Solar purchasers might be required to make required investments related to solar panel recycling. These investments would return on themselves back to the solar consumers. Sometimes better, sometimes a little worse, sometimes a LOT better ROI's.
Your videos always give me tech blue balls
You diction is amazing. Where'd you learn that?
I see a future where we are mining landfills for silver among other things. We will certainly be recycling solar panels then.
Green energy is great. But still pie in the sky. Also all made in China. Which is why I rely on propane.
Maybe simplistic, but if you could make the panel last twice as long there would half as much waste?
u say fact strangely like fay-ack. lol
The energy economics are crucial. If you are using as much fossil fuel energy to make, transport, install, remove, transport to recycler, and then to recycle it’s all a bit pointless from an environmental standpoint even if it makes a profit commercially.
It's good to see more work being done on this. For now if you have old panels it's probably best to just hold on to them for now imo. Also they shouldn't allow patents for recycling methods, this is something that should be open and available to everyone.
We really need to develop new recycling methods, and everyhing which needed recycling later should include the cost of this process in its price. Beside that we need to design everything to be easily recycled and to last much more. Nowadays the low cost, integration, more thinner, more lighter what companies seek, not to mention the planned obsolescence. They design and manufacture things to broke down sooner. I think the greedy capitalism is one of the main source of this problem, so without new very strict government policies the things wont change.
I think the recycling industry has tons of skeletons in their closets. Started with materials that claimed to be recycled, but cant, and ended with recycled materials that noone wants to buy. In between there are several processes which simply does not work. The people gets the illusion of recycling.
Matt, is this not all about adopting a circular economy? I know full well you are aware of what JB Straubel of Redwood Materials are doing with EV batteries and the enormous potential. Society, like a messy kid, has to wake up to the circularity of all that they do. The mess they make has to be cleaned up by them, not the man down the road or woman across the street.As you say, Europe is light years ahead of the rest of the world. But, with the right regulatory framework and our innovation this can make money as well. Thanks for addressing these difficult subjects.
I have a pair of 45 watt solar panels on my RV that where built in 1992, and another pair from 1997 that are 120 watts. I don't plan on disposing of them just because they are over 20 years old, they just keep working! My guess is that more panels will get re-used instead of being recycled. I would love to get ahold of some used 220 watt solar panels – even 20+ year old panels.
Everything needs to be designed to be as recyclable as possible going forward. A circular economy is the only way civilisation can survive, else we will rapidly run out of available resources on the planet.
Excellent presentation! Comprehensive and updated!
Capitalism will kill us all in the end
We have 60 panels that we bought second hand. They still have so much life left in them. They only had a loss of 3-5% and we bought them for 33 cents on the dollar.
(edited for grammar)
Every solution today is an issue tomorrow.
Every time I hear the phrase “it’s complicated” with respect to any form of alternative energy I think here we go again with even more government subsidies and regulation to cover up the fact that alternative energy just does not work. This Video did not disappoint.
Looks to be a problem with equation 5 of $185 per kg. Silver is approx $640/kg, so solar cell would need to be 29% silver, which is doubtful. In the paper shown author missed a decimal point and used $120000/kg for AgCl.
I think gov should fund not just the recycling of solar panels but the recycling of everything.
go
Guess i'll go back to my coal stove.
Since the US and europe doesn't make anything they been reduced to scavengers lol
the Zulu nation is rising, the most resilient nation of 11 million, after 1000s of years, they will spread the globe and make the world a great place for all, uniting the divided and restoring an equitable world
https://youtu.be/C5gmHaWDZTk
what is this horsesh!t about solar cells and wind turbines being this big "problem" to re-cycle ???? nobody ever made a peep about all the really nasty consumerization of crt tv's and the total disaster they were , then there were computers on top of that with crt screens and tv sets went to disgusting huge absurd crt before lcd … where was the established fossil fuel industry running their smear campaigns ? they weren't because it all used MORE ENERGY !!!!
Great video Matt. Thanks for shedding more light on this important topic (see what I did there?). Also, congratulations on 1 million subs! You’ve come a long way since I started watching your channel about four years ago!
Environmentalist never take this problem into account in their rush to get off the oil and gas bandwagon. They completely gloss over this major issue.
I discussed this problem with a PV panel recycler and the low value is a big problem now, but that low value is due to the fact that economists do not take into account the externalized costs, such as wildlife habitat destruction in acquiring the raw materials. This isn't surprising as people have never taken the costs to others that they don't value into account. To close the loop on all waste we need government mandates that would also create new industries that would run the pyrolysis plants that would break the molecular bonds of the materials to release the smaller compounds that comprise whatever material makes up whatever product is being recycled. It would also help if the government developed large, industrial scale fast reactors, such as the EBR II (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIeE9NMP8Oc) to provide unlimited power for pyrolysis and other recycling power needs.
The problem in the US is libertarianism that rejects out of hand our obligations to others and has allowed laissez-faire economic policies to degrade wildlife habitat, slaughter wildlife, allow industry to pollute, allow people to waste, etc. To create a sustainable economy we need to generate an end to what Reagan started and replace it with a sustainable economy. Otherwise, we will not avoid a Permian Extinction scale event due entirely to human overpopulation and our extractive economy.
Thank you for this video on a very important and unappreciated subject! While there are technological innovations discussed here, it seems to me it's mainly a story about costs and incentives. When it's cheaper and easier to throw used solar panels in the landfill, that's what people will do. (Thereby distributing the true costs to all of us in the form of congested landfills and pollution.) But when government applies both incentives and regulations to make sure the cost of solar panel disposal falls upon the people who are responsible for it (the solar panel users and manufacturers), it creates a situation where there is now an incentive to decrease the cost of recycling. And like lead acid batteries before them, that's what people will do. They'll come up with new technologies or improve existing ones to bring that cost of recycling down.
It's just a matter of making sure the cost of disposal remains with the people who created and used the product, instead of being distributed to everyone through degradation of the environment.
I don’t know why our country does not invest in more Plasma Furnace. It supposed to burn everything and produce fuel for vehicles and other energies.
The only way all of this works is to raise the price of petroleum products exponentially, as we are seeing now. The current administration got caught artificially raising the price of unleaded and diesel.
I don't understand why people go to all this trouble rather than just pouring all this investment into modular nuclear reactors
This is simple make the manufactures of the panels recycle one panel for every new panel sold case closed
Wait until my compostable solar panels come online haha
I feel like you might not be taking our WEEE waste seriously