Environmentalists will kill us all.
Better call Barone Sanitation.
Same issue with those composite wind turbine blades. Can’t burn, ‘em, can’t put them in anything but a hazardous waste landfill, only a fraction of them can be marketed as a pavement additive, and the only place in world that can recycle them is in Germany.
It’s estimated that Denmark will have 225,000 tonnes of blade waste by 2035.
I worked at inventing sputtered thin film cadmium silicon diarsenide back in the late ‘70s. recovering the elements in thin films and conductors, and recycling the metals to make new solar cells ought not to be rocket science. The substrates and structural frames ought not to be dangerous. Somebody is determined to chicken-little this issue and terrorize chemical ignoramuses here.
Why not just pile it all up. That is what they do with the waist from the nuclear power plants.
Panels lose efficiency yearly. They make some sense for very rural, low load situations. They certainly aren’t a panacea at this point. Without subsidies and emotions, solar is very disappointing.