End-of-life is just the beginning

By weight, recycling a solar module can look deceptively simple. Separate the glass and get it to a specialist recycler, and you're already 70% of the way there. The small quantities of silver and other valuable materials wrapped up in a module are much harder to recover. This creates a problem: a high recycling rate may reveal little about the value, purity, or the eventual use of materials. "Glass accounts for more than 70% of a PV module but has a raw material value of only around €50 ($58) per ton. Silver makes up less than 0.05% of the module but is worth approximately €1.77 million per ...

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