As sales of solar power increase, disposing waste from outdated or destroyed solar panels is often overlooked. A surge in solar panel disposal is expected to take place in the early 2030s, given the design life of solar energy systems installed around the millennium.
To address this problem before this big disposal wave, the EU has funded the ELSi project to explore ways to ensure that valuable components do not end up in landfills. With strong competencies in plant manufacturing and wastewater treatment including recycling, the German engineering company, Geltz Umwelt-Technologie, has built a test and treatment facility at a large disposal firm to retrieve reusable materials from solar modules.
So far, waste management has been limited to the recycling of the aluminum frames and cover glasses of the modules. “Solar module layers are bonded together with polymers that make mechanical separation and treatment of solar module components almost impossible,” explains management assistant Fabian Geltz.
Using an energy-efficient pyrolysis process, project partners managed to dissolve the undesired polymer layers and easily detach the glass in the panels. This novel advanced process enabled them to successfully separate and recover aluminum, glass, silver, copper, tin and silicon in their pure form. During the process of isolating and classifying materials, the fine materials were separated by sieves and air classifiers. To treat the exhaust gases of the mechanical process, project partners used a thermal afterburner and a quench system with a gas scrubber.
After extensive test operations aimed at optimizing the process parameters, the new industrial pilot facility could process up to 50 000 solar modules per year. The project’s recovery methods should yield over 95 percent of recycled material.
Read the full story at https://phys.org/news/2018-08-state-of-the-art-solar-panel-recycling.html.