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What happens when solar panels die?
Do Solar Panels ever get a second chance?
“I took about 50 from that site, tested them to see their value for reuse [and] generation capacity,” he said, most of which were within the “tolerance range of the manufacturer.” Essentially, for the odd crack in the glass or bump on the frame — which may cause problems down the line — the panels were otherwise perfectly functional. “With the materials inside, there are more precious metals with higher value,” he said, “but they’re mixed in with the plastic polymer layers [...] which are hard to separate economically.” Consequently, the silicon, silver and copper embedded in the cells are often ground down into bulk and abandoned. It added that often these recycling processes aren’t optimized to run solar panels, and so “there is frequently some downgrading of recovered material quality,” hardly a great step on the road to circularity.
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