It ain't easy being green

[George K]

"Renewable Energy Waste" - Time to pay the piper:

Solar panels are an increasingly important source of renewable power that will play an essential role in fighting climate change. They are also complex pieces of technology that become big, bulky sheets of electronic waste at the end of their lives — and right now, most of the world doesn’t have a plan for dealing with that.

But we’ll need to develop one soon, because the solar e-waste glut is coming. By 2050, the International Renewable Energy Agency projects that up to 78 million metric tons of solar panels will have reached the end of their life, and that the world will be generating about 6 million metric tons of new solar e-waste annually. While the latter number is a small fraction of the total e-waste humanity produces each year, standard electronics recycling methods don’t cut it for solar panels. Recovering the most valuable materials from one, including silver and silicon, requires bespoke recycling solutions. And if we fail to develop those solutions along with policies that support their widespread adoption, we already know what will happen..

Dump 'em where you put the fiberglass wind turbine blades.

[taiwan_girl]

I think this is a somewhat minor issue when compare to the savings in trash and other waste generated by other types of fuels.

[jon-nyc]

That’s the amount of garbage we now produce in 24 days.

And it buys us CO2 reduction measured in gigatonnes annually.

Pretty good deal.