Euronews.green writes that 90% of the unusable solar panels today reach landfills, instead of being recycled.
Through a new thermal and chemical technique, students at Deakin University in Australia aim to transform old and broken solar panels into new means of harnessing sunlight power.
Anthony Vippond, CEO of the Australian renewable energy specialized company Lotus Energy, said that "solar's meant to be a renewable energy, sustainability-related product. Getting the best recovery out of a solar panel is probably more paramount than any other product."
Recycling photovoltaics is time consuming and expensive, as it first requires the disassembly of the panels into individual components.
The method proposed by the team at Deakin University uses complex chemical and heating processes that don't use dangerous chemicals, which means that recycling solar panels is not only risk-free, but also faster than other methods.
Mokhlesur Rahman of Deakin University said that "there are many other technologies around the world, but most of the technologies are complicated, multi-step, time-consuming."
The silicon material found within solar panels is worth it itself, as it is can be used to improve the performance of lithium-ion batteries.
The new method of recycling will now be tested to see if it can work at large scale and researchers will also try to use the recycled materials to create low-cost batteries.
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