The Solar Panel Toxic Waste Problem

Posted: September 16, 2019 by oldbrew in Accountability, Energy
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‘Solar panels generate 300 times more toxic waste per unit of energy than nuclear power plants’ – and in some parts of the world recycling rules can be sketchy, or worse.

PA Pundits International

By Duggan Flanakin ~

For decades, the solar industry benefited from generous federal, state, and local subsidies to increase its footprint. Yet these generous subsidies ignore the costs of disposal of solar panel waste.

Things may be changing. In May 2018, Michael Shellenberger, a Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment” and Green Book Award Winner, wrote in Forbes that the problem of solar panel disposal will explode with full force in two or three decades and wreck the environment because it is a huge amount of waste which is not easy to recycle.

Shellenberger was citing comments, published in the South China Morning Post, from Chinese solar expert Tian Min, general manager of Nanjing Fangrun Materials, a recycling company in Jiangsu province that collects retired solar panels. Tian called his country’s solar power industry “a ticking time bomb.”

This is not really news. The Associated Press had reported in 2013…

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Comments
  1. ivan says:
    September 17, 2019 at 9:43 am

    The only ‘renewable’ energy product that does not produce vast amounts of toxic waste is pumped water storage, ALL the others are so polluting that in a rational society their manufacture would be banned. The question becomes ‘how do we get through the thick blinkered, head in the sand attitude of the members of the UN Cult of Climatology to show them that they are the problem not CO2.’

  2. Dave Ward says:
    September 17, 2019 at 9:44 am

    One unfortunate fact that won’t get airtime in the media. And one unfortunate fact that should be fired back at any “younger” members of society the next time they accuse “old people” of destroying their future…

  3. Peter Kirby says:
    September 17, 2019 at 10:59 am

    With regard to blinkered, head in the sand attitudes of the deluded UN and governments around the world, the CO2 hypothesis of global warming and climate change is complete nonsense. This was revealed by clause 38 of the climate treaty signed at the IPCC conference at Copenhagen 2009. This set out a system of international government, facilitative mechanism, and financial mechanism to enable the UN to redistribute international wealth from rich countries to poor countries. Its unintended effect has been to redistribute wealth from poor people to rich people.
    Its deceitfulness has been attested in 2010 by Ottmar Edenhofer chairman of the IPCC Assessment Report Working Group 3 who said:”One must say clearly that we redistribute de-facto the World’s wealth by climate policy……One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore”
    And further admitted by Professor Chris Holland of the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research who said “The data does not matter. We are not basing our recommendations on the data. We are basing them on the climate models”.

  4. stpaulchuck says:
    September 17, 2019 at 4:32 pm

    with all the billions (trillions?) of dollars of profits and graft in the so-called “green energy” arena, this will get spiked and the kids will never hear the truth. The stupid windmills aren’t really any cleaner from what I’ve been reading. It’s all a scam of the worst sort.

    ———
    List of 36 failed green energy companies
    Evergreen Solar ($25 million)*
    SpectraWatt ($500,000)*
    Solyndra ($535 million)*
    Beacon Power ($43 million)*
    Nevada Geothermal ($98.5 million)
    SunPower ($1.2 billion)
    First Solar ($1.46 billion)
    Babcock and Brown ($178 million)
    EnerDel’s subsidiary Ener1 ($118.5 million)*
    Amonix ($5.9 million)
    Fisker Automotive ($529 million)
    Abound Solar ($400 million)*
    A123 Systems ($279 million)*
    Willard and Kelsey Solar Group ($700,981)*
    Johnson Controls ($299 million)
    Schneider Electric ($86 million)
    Brightsource ($1.6 billion)
    ECOtality ($126.2 million)
    Raser Technologies ($33 million)*
    Energy Conversion Devices ($13.3 million)*
    Mountain Plaza, Inc. ($2 million)*
    Olsen’s Crop Service and Olsen’s Mills Acquisition Company ($10 million)*
    Range Fuels ($80 million)*
    Thompson River Power ($6.5 million)*
    Stirling Energy Systems ($7 million)*
    Azure Dynamics ($5.4 million)*
    GreenVolts ($500,000)
    Vestas ($50 million)
    LG Chem’s subsidiary Compact Power ($151 million)
    Nordic Windpower ($16 million)*
    Navistar ($39 million)
    Satcon ($3 million)*
    Konarka Technologies Inc. ($20 million)*
    Mascoma Corp. ($100 million)