An international mission
Solar panels primarily consist of glass (75%), aluminum (10%), and the copolymer ethylene vinyl acetate (EVA, 10%), along with smaller amounts of silicon, copper and silver. “Solar panels are able to withstand at least 20 years of wind, rain and sun because these materials are of high quality. They should be recycled and reused,” says Fu Yaw-shyan, a professor in the Department of Greenergy at National University of Tainan.
PV Cycle, a member-based PV takeback and recycling scheme established by the European Union, is currently the world leader in solar panel recycling. Processors typically disassemble the aluminum frames of the panels, then shred the remaining material and heat it to vaporize the EVA polymers and backsheets. The process enables the recovery of most of the aluminum, silicon, copper, silver and glass in the panels.
Unfortunately, the panels’ backsheets typically contain fluorine, which is released when the backsheets are pyrolyzed. Flourine damages the ozone layer, so recycling facilities have to install equipment to capture it, making the facilities as large as steel mills, and driving their construction costs to nearly NT$100 million.
Fu says that Europe’s recycling industry isn’t as developed as Taiwan’s, and doesn’t bother recycling EVA and backsheets. Even if the Europeans went to the trouble of doing so, the materials have so little value that they would end up going into a landfill or being incinerated. Europe currently also lacks the technology to mechanically separate these materials from solar panels, which is why processors just burn them off. Fu resolved to find ways to fully recycle PV panels because he believes that wasting useful materials and letting them become a pollution concern is antithetical to the goals of green energy.
The quartz on the left can be refined into the metallurgical grade silicon (MGS) on the right. MGS is a key raw material for the PV and semiconductor industries.