California has been pushing for rooftop solar power, building up the largest solar market in the U.S., reports The Los Angeles Times (July 15, 2022) More than 20 years and 1.3 million rooftops later, the bill is coming due. Since 2006, the state, focused on incentivizing people to use solar power, showering subsidies on homeowners who installed panels but had no plan to dispose of them. Now, panels purchased under those programs are nearing the end of their 25-to-30-year life cycle.
Many are winding up in landfills, and in some cases, contaminating groundwater with toxic heavy metals. Only 1 in 10 panels are actually recycled. The challenge over how to handle truckloads of contaminated waste illustrates how cutting-edge environmental policy can create unforeseen problems. “The industry is supposed to be green,” said an industry expert. “But in reality, it’s all about the money.”
“This trash is probably going to arrive sooner than we expected and it is going to be huge,” writes Harvard Business Review. “While all the focus has been on building this renewable capacity, not much consideration has been put on the end of life of these technologies.” Disassembling panels and recovering the glass, silver and silicon is extremely difficult.
Highly specialized equipment, furnaces, and workers are needed. Panels are classified as hazardous materials, which require expensive restrictions on packaging, transport and storage. The economics of the process don’t make a compelling case for recycling. Only $2 to $4 worth of materials are recovered from each panel. It costs $20 to $30 to recycle a panel versus $1 to $2 to send it to a landfill.
The number of installed solar panels in the next decade will exceed hundreds of millions in California alone, and that recycling will become even more crucial as cheaper panels with shorter life spans become more popular.
A lack of consumer awareness about the toxicity of panels and how to dispose of them is part of the problem. “There’s an informational gap, a technological gap, and a financial gap,” say experts. The only solution seems to be extended producer responsibility, in which the cost of recycling is built into the cost of a product at its initial purchase. Business entities in the product chain — rather than the public — would become responsible for end-of-life costs, including recycling costs.
Classroom discussion questions:
- Supp. 5 in your Heizer/Render/Munson text deals with this issue in detail. Which model(s) can be applied here?
- What is the “systems view,” the “commons view,” and the “triple bottom line view” in this case?