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“Rather than treating a solar panel as waste, we’re treating it as a source of valuable materials that can be recovered and put back into the supply chain.”
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Solar panels are widely seen as a marker of the shift to cleaner energy and a cleaner environment. On the flip side, the growth of solar power also means a large wave of retired equipment is coming as millions of older modules reach the end of their useful lives. 
The question of what to do with all those old panels is at the core of a new perspective paper from NYU Tandon School of Engineering researchers.
A press release on the paper notes that without stronger recycling systems, discarded photovoltaic modules could amount to more than 88 million tons of waste by 2050.
The researchers noted today’s recycling efforts mostly recover the easier-to-remove parts of panels, including aluminum frames, glass, and copper wiring. 
Pulling out higher-value materials such as silver, indium, gallium, tellurium, and lead is usually much more technically difficult and expensive. In response, researchers are looking at hydrometallurgy, a liquid-based way of separating specific metals without relying on extreme heat. 
“It’s a much more selective approach,” post-doctoral researcher Sara Hamilton explained in the release. “Rather than treating a solar panel as waste, we’re treating it as a source of valuable materials that can be recovered and put back into the supply chain.”
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If old solar panels are sent to landfills or recycled inefficiently, the result would be a new environmental burden and the loss of materials that took significant mining and energy to produce.
One reason is that many recycling systems still depend on pyrometallurgy, in which materials are separated by melting them at very high temperatures. That method can be effective, but it also consumes substantial energy and can make it harder to cleanly isolate individual metals for reuse, the researchers said.
The problem appears across major solar technologies. Conventional crystalline silicon panels make up about 95% of the global market, and recovering their valuable silver often requires acids such as nitric acid, which are effective but also corrosive, hazardous to handle, and difficult to recycle.
Thin-film solar cells face much the same issue, because recovering their critical metals also usually depends on harsh chemical treatments.
Researchers argue that solar panels should be designed with recycling in mind from the start rather than treated as a disposal problem later on. That approach could make material recovery easier and reduce the environmental cost of the clean energy transition.
Perovskite solar cells are one example that looks especially encouraging. The emerging technology has already drawn attention for lower manufacturing costs and high laboratory efficiencies. 
Perovskites are built from layers connected by relatively weak chemical interactions. Those properties seem to make recycling much simpler. 
The NYU researchers pointed to studies showing that lead, one of the key ingredients in perovskites, can be recovered with hot water. As the water cools, the lead crystallizes into a compound that can be used to make new perovskite solar cells.
That could help bring the technology to a more sustainable conclusion.
“Solar panels are the clean energy infrastructure of the future,” researcher Juanita Hidalgo declared in the press release. “But to make solar truly sustainable, we also need to think about what happens after these technologies reach the end of their lifetime.”
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