Recycle them. They are almost entirely recyclable, and facilities are actively operating today that perform this recycling. Veolia’s plant in France has been operating since 2018 [1]. Lotus Energy in Australia went live this year [2], recycling 100 percent of the input without using hazardous chemicals. First Solar is providing recycling services (90% recovery) in the US, Germany, and Malaysia [3].
As long as government requires recycling to create a market for this work to be done (instead of dumping in a landfill), it’s mostly solved (logistically speaking, you’re going to want facilities on every occupied continent so you’re not shipping or dumping panels elsewhere).
Already developing products address the question. Below is a post from June 2021, followed by one for the paper it discusses - regarding the 'benefits to recycling perovskite** solar panels, though they are still in the commercial development stage...'
> In order to make sure they’re ready, though, the solar industry is creating programs to train commercial recycling companies to understand what’s in manufacturers’ products and how to break them down,
It seems to me like recycling should be part of the design process for these products. Instead of hoping that recyclers are able to do something with them, we should require that manufacturers account for the entire lifecycle of the product up-front.
With the exception of truly defective panels, this is a pretty long range issue. Panels just degrade fairly linearly over a very long period of time. In 20 years they may still produce 75 percent of their rated output…. I’m pretty sure they will find homes where space is not at a premium for another 20 to 40 years after that. Then, yes, most will need to be recycled.
Solar panels are still useful after "end of life". They may only output 80% of the power they used to, but that can still be of value to someone. Maybe the time when they actually need to be scrapped is more like 50-75 years, not sure we actually know yet.
Solar has or is reaching wholesale grid price parity in many markets so it has in essence bootstrapped and the energy that goes into new solar panel production should increasingly be from existing solar panels.
This is a really good question, especially since a substantial fraction of the cheap Chinese solar panels produced in the past decade are not even lasting long enough to fully pay for themselves. Lower-tier Chinese panels are now frequently seen to be delaminating after just 6 or 7 years. At that point, they begin leaching toxic heavy metals into the environment.
Recycling them makes no economic or energy sense, so most will wind up in landfills, poisoning the ground for centuries to come.
Poison is a matter of degree, and mining is the process of taking huge volumes of ore and concentrating the metals, so yes you can poison groundwater with material that was previously distributed in the ground
As long as government requires recycling to create a market for this work to be done (instead of dumping in a landfill), it’s mostly solved (logistically speaking, you’re going to want facilities on every occupied continent so you’re not shipping or dumping panels elsewhere).
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-solar-recycling-idUSKBN1J...
[2] https://interestingengineering.com/australias-first-working-...
[3] https://www.firstsolar.com/en/Modules/Recycling
(Post is from 2018 and is stale)