Mool Gupta News Today

The great majority of worn and damaged panels are still dumped in landfills. In this desert city where Arizona, California, Sonora and Baja California meet, North America’s first utility-scale solar panel recycling plant has opened to address what founders of We Recycle Solar call a “tsunami” of solar waste. Plans to address climate change rely on massively scaling up clean, solar electricity.

A recycling industry is taking shape.

The largest solar panel recycling plant in North America has opened in Yuma, Arizona, just as the flow of used and spent solar panels sharply ramps up

As prices for solar panels have come down, more and more people are putting them up, but those panels have a limited lifespan of 20 to 30 years. Experts now estimate that by 2050 the planet could be stuck with 78 million tons of used solar panels. Recycling is not cost-effective, but a University of Virginia professor may be on track to change that.

Each panel has about 20 grams of silver on average because the metal is an efficient heat and electricity conductor.

Researchers use laser ablation to extract the silver from old solar panels to put the valuable material back into new solar panels and biomedical devices.