The toxic side of the sun

“The solar industry is booming. That’s good for the climate.” This is the lead of an article in Yale Climate Connections and whatever you think about climate change you’ve got to admit it’s absolutely charming. Alas, not all about solar is charming.

The least charming aspect of solar is its composition, which features, besides polysilicon made through a highly energy-intensive process, glass, chemicals such as cadmium and lead, as well as tellurium and antimony, and aluminium in the frame. Alas, not all of these components are exactly charming. Because some of them are toxic.

In July, the Los Angeles Times published an article headlined California went big on rooftop solar. Now that’s a problem for landfills. In it the author reported that most of the green movement poster state’s solar waste is ending up in landfills, creating a toxic leakage risk.

Interestingly, the article was later amended, and I quote, to “An earlier version of this article mischaracterized the environmental risk posed by heavy metals in consumer photovoltaic arrays. This story has been edited to clarify that panels containing toxic materials are routed for disposal to landfills with extra safeguards against leakage, and to note that panels that contain cadmium and selenium are primarily used in utility-grade applications.”

Gods forbid someone starts thinking the solar industry is anything less than perfectly responsible. These safeguards, however, do not exactly answer the question of what we are going to do in 20 years when the solar waste will be a lot greater.

One academic quoted by the LA Times’ Rachel Kisela put it succinctly:

“This trash is probably going to arrive sooner than we expected and it is going to be a huge amount of waste,” said Serasu Duran, an assistant professor at the University of Calgary’s Haskayne School of Business in Canada. “But 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.”

The most obvious was to deal with this is recycling. Alas, the most obvious answer isn’t always the best one and solar happens to be one of these unfortunate cases.