While being promoted worldwide as a major means of reducing carbon emissions, solar panels have a lifespan of up to 25 years.
Experts claim that billions of panels will eventually have to be thrown away and replaced.
"There are so many panels installed in the world that they have more than one terawatt of solar capacity. Ordinary solar panels have a capacity of about 400 watts.
"If you include rooftops and solar farms, there could be as many as 2,5 billion panels," says Dr. Rong Deng, a solar panel recycling expert at the University of New South Wales in Australia.
There are tens of millions of solar panels in Great Britain, according to government data, but the infrastructure for their disposal and recycling is lagging behind.
Energy experts are calling for urgent government action to prevent an impending global environmental disaster.
"Discarded solar panels will turn into a mountain of waste by 2050, if we do not immediately establish recycling chains," says Ute Collier, deputy director of the International Renewable Energy Agency.
"We're making more and more solar panels, which is great, but how are we going to deal with the waste," she wonders.
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Experts hope that a big step will be taken at the end of June, when the first factory dedicated exclusively to the recycling of solar panels will be officially opened in France.
ROSI, the specialist solar recycling company that owns the facility in the Alpine city of Grenoble, hopes to eventually be able to recover and reuse 99 percent of the parts.
In addition to recycling glass fronts and aluminum frames, the new factory can extract almost all the precious materials contained in the panels, such as silver and copper.
These rare materials can later be recycled and reused to make new, more powerful solar panels.
Most of the aluminum and glass can be saved with the usual ways of recycling solar panels.
However, ROSI says that the glass will then be of relatively poor quality.
Glass salvaged using these methods can be used for tile making or sandblasting.
It can also be mixed with other materials to make asphalt, but it cannot be used to make things that require high-quality glass, such as new solar panels.
Blooming period
ROSI's new facility will open at a time when solar panel installations are booming.
In 2021, the world's solar energy production capacity increased by 22 percent.
Around 13.000 photovoltaic solar panels are installed every month in Great Britain, most of them on the roofs of private houses.
In many cases, solar panels become relatively unprofitable before they reach the end of their useful life.
Solar panel designs are regularly improved, making it cheap to replace those that are only 10 or 15 years old with more modern versions.
If the current craze for the installation of these panels continues, says Collier, their amount in landfills could be huge.
"By 2030, we predict that we will have four million tons of panels in waste, which is an amount that we can still fight against
"But by 2050, we could end up with more than 200 million tons in the world," says Collier.
To illustrate how much it is, we'll just say that the world currently produces a total of 400 million tons of plastic every year.
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The challenges of recycling
The reason why there are so few solar panel recycling facilities is because until recently there was not much waste to process and reuse.
The first generation of home solar panels is just now starting to expire.
And as the panels near retirement, experts say urgent action is needed.
"Now is the time to think about it," says Collier.
France is already a leader among European countries when it comes to processing photovoltaic waste, says Nicolas Defren.
His organization Soren, in partnership with ROSI and other companies, collaborates throughout France to extract parts from solar panels that can be reused.
"The biggest one we dismantled took us three months," recalls Defren.
His team at Soren is experimenting with different ways to recycle what they collect.
"We're trying everything we can think of to see if something works," he says.
At ROSI's high-tech facility in Grenoble, solar panels are painstakingly disassembled to salvage the precious materials inside them, such as copper, silicon and silver.
Each solar panel contains only tiny pieces of these precious materials, and they are so intertwined with other components that, until now, it has not been cost-effective to separate them.
But because they're so valuable, efficiently extracting those precious materials could be revolutionary, Defren says.
"More than 60 percent of the value is contained in three percent of the weight of the solar panels," he says.
The team at Soren hopes that, in the future, nearly three-quarters of the materials needed to make new solar panels, including silver, can be salvaged from retired photovoltaic panels and recycled to help speed up the production of new ones.
Currently, there is not enough silver available to make the millions of solar panels that will be necessary to transition away from fossil fuels, Defren says.
"You can see where the production bottleneck is, which is silver," he says.
Meanwhile, British scientists are trying to develop similar technology to ROSI.
Last year, researchers from the University of Leicester communicated that they found a way to extract silver from photovoltaic solar panels using a certain salt solution.
But, for now, ROSI is the only company in this field that has managed to expand the operation to an industrial level.
Also, this technology is very expensive.
In Europe, importers or manufacturers of solar panels are responsible for their end-of-life disposal.
Many people prefer to scoop them up and take them to the scrap yard, which is much cheaper.
Defren admits that intensive recycling of solar panels is still in its infancy.
Soren and his partners recycled just under 4.000 tonnes of French solar panels last year.
But there is potential to achieve much more.
And he made it his mission.
"The weight of all new solar panels sold in France last year was 232.000 tons," he says.
He says that he will have to collect that much every year, when they wear out in two decades.
"When that happens, my idea is to ensure that France becomes a world technological leader," he says.
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