What happens to your solar panels when they have to be replaced?
What happens to your solar panels when they have to be replaced? - As early solar projects age, the industry is confronting an uncomfortable truth. Most solar panels were never designed to be repaired, upgraded, or taken apart. With global solar waste projected to reach up to 250 million tonnes by 2050, extending asset life through repair and repowering may matter more than recycling alone.
We call solar “clean,” yet most panels were designed to be thrown away.
As solar installations from the 2000s and early 2010s continue operating, the industry is starting to confront a problem that was largely ignored at the start: what happens when panels are removed from service. If current designs do not change, global solar waste could reach up to 78-250 million tonnes by 2050.
The issue is not just volume. It is design.
To survive decades of weather, solar panels are built as sealed products. Layers of glass, silicon cells, plastics, and adhesives are bonded together so tightly that the panel becomes a single, inseparable unit. That durability helps panels last, but it also makes them extremely difficult to fix, upgrade, or dismantle later.
When panels come out of service, recycling is often presented as the solution. In practice, recycling today is a blunt tool. Most processes focus on recovering glass and aluminum, while the materials that carry the most economic and strategic value are largely lost.
Silver is the clearest example. It makes up just 0.14% of a panel’s weight, but represents over 40% of its material value and about 10% of its total cost. During standard recycling, panels are crushed. The silver is pulverized into tiny particles and mixed with glass and plastics, making it too difficult and expensive to recover. Once that happens, the value is gone.
That is why strategies that extend the life of solar panels are far more effective than recycling. Repair and upgrades preserve value, avoid the enormous energy cost of industrial shredding, keep critical materials in circulation, and reduce the need for new mining. They can even create new revenue for asset owners. But this only works if panels are designed for it.
Today, most are not.
Future panels should be designed so they can be repaired, upgraded, and eventually disassembled without destroying their components. That means moving away from permanent adhesives and fully laminated layers, and toward modular designs with removable frames, junction boxes, and connectors. It means using mechanical fasteners or adhesives that can be reversed under specific conditions, so glass and cells can be separated instead of crushed.
Without that shift, even the best recycling or digital tracking tools will only deliver marginal gains. If panels are glued shut and designed for disposal, the waste problem is already locked in.
At Do Good Energy, we focus on keeping solar assets productive longer. We acquire commercial solar projects that owners no longer want and repower them so they stay in service instead of being prematurely removed.
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