‘Solar Trash Tsunami’: How Solar Power Is Causing a Looming Environmental Crisis

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The meteoric rise of solar power is set to trigger a “tsunami” of unrecyclable waste as consumers trade in their outdated solar panels for better ones, according to a new study from the University of Calgary.

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“Put simply, we can expect a lot more solar panel waste over the next decade than we are prepared for,” wrote a team led by Calgary-based supply chain researcher Serasu Duran. , in a preprint article.

The study – which attempted to estimate the gross tonnage of solar panels expected to reach landfills in the coming years – warned that unless the solar industry gets its waste problem under control, “we could soon face the dark side of renewable energy.”

Although hydroelectricity remains by far the largest source of renewable energy in Canada, solar capacity has exploded in recent years. Driven largely by government incentives, at the end of 2019 Canada had 3,310 MW of solar panels, up from just 221 MW in 2010, an increase of 1,500%. If the sun is shining, all of these panels technically have a capacity matching that of the Pickering Nuclear Generating Station in Ontario.

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However, solar panels have a short lifespan and are particularly unsuitable for recycling. They contain very little recoverable material and, as bulky sheets of glass, they are expensive to transport to a recycling facility.

“To the best of our knowledge, there is no consensus regarding an efficient recycling technology for glass panels over 90%. Nor are there any large-scale established regulations,” said Duran to the National Post “Pretty much anyone can take a television to a municipal recycling center, not so much with a solar panel on the roof.”

The International Renewable Energy Agency (IREA) sounded the alarm over solar waste as early as 2016, warning that by 2050 the world would need to find a way to manage up to 78 million tonnes of infrastructure obsolete sunglasses. For context, New York – one of the most waste-producing cities on the entire planet – only produces 14 million tons of waste each year.

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Nonetheless, Duran’s team considers the IREA number a vast underestimate, as it assumes that most existing solar panels around the world will remain bolted to roofs for at least 30 years.

The most likely scenario, they say, is that millions of people can be expected to tear down their solar panels early in order to install cheaper and more efficient replacements. In this case, by 2030, the volume of solar waste could be up to 50 times higher than predicted by the IREA.

By 2035, the solar industry could generate 2.5 tons of waste for every ton of solar panels it installs, burdening municipalities and homeowners with disposal costs. “The solar economy – so bright from a 2021 perspective – would rapidly darken as the industry collapses under the weight of its own waste,” she and her co-authors wrote in a recent review. of their research for Harvard. Activity Report .

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And Duran’s team only studied solar panels bolted to residential homes. Add industrial solar farms and replacement costs become “much, much higher”.

The study compared the coming global wave of solar waste to the current e-waste crisis. The sudden increase in rapidly obsolete computers, televisions and cell phones has spawned literal mountains of hard-to-recycle waste loaded with harmful chemicals, such as lead and cadmium. In the worst-case scenario, shipping containers full of black market e-waste end up in unregulated landfills in developing countries.

“History seems to be repeating itself with renewable energy installations, and most likely much sooner than we thought,” the paper read.

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With each year bringing cheaper and more efficient solar technology, solar panels are plagued with many of the same lifespan issues as consumer electronics. In the same way that computers are getting progressively faster each year, solar panels are becoming progressively better at generating electricity – about 0.5% more efficient each year.

Rapid advances in technology also make it “almost impossible to imagine a robust market for used solar panels,” the Duran study reads.

Duran’s team noted that none of this is a reason to abandon solar technology, writing in Harvard Business Review that a waste crisis is still a relatively minor issue compared to leaving a “planet damaged, even dying, to future generations” as a result of uncontrolled control. the use of fossil fuels. The “tsunami” is also expected to level off once rapid advances in solar technology slow down and it becomes less attractive to replace still functional roof panels with a more modern alternative. “It will likely be a significant but temporary issue,” Duran said.

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Nonetheless, the document urges the green tech industry to “seriously anticipate this solar panel waste tsunami” and consider new designs and end-of-life treatment that could prevent the mountains of obsolete solar panels to come. are simply buried in landfills.

The researchers also note that solar energy is not the only aspect of the green economy with a looming and unresolved waste problem, pointing to a coming tide of obsolete electric vehicle batteries and wind turbines, which will not also have no easy route to recycling.

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