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They just toss them into the ocean to hope it creates a n artificial barrier reef?

This sounds excellent. Rather than some complicated process involving harmful chemicals and the like, they're physically separating the panel materials without requiring any additional polluting materials.

Moreover, they've thought through the logistics of scaling it up and localizing it such that you don't have to, say, ship your panels to southeast Asia to recycle.

Sounds like this really needs to be adopted as regulation and funded to be a normal part of the product life cycle.

Right next to the rollerblades

I'm gonna be that guy here. The problems around cost are solely down to our Capitalist culture, and can be utterly countered by State subsidies like those offered in places like China. Which, ironically enough, is where almost all of the worlds actual recycling takes place.

The real issues with recycling Solar Panels is that most of the stuff can't be recycled and has to be sent to landfill anyway. Even then, what can be recycled has to be recycled down into more disposable and single-use type things.

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I know it's a bit of a shitty thing to be bringing down uplifting news like this, but when it comes to climate change, news articles like this encourage a culture of turning a blind eye to fake solutions with ego padding headlines that are often used by people to embrace a comforting lie and avoid the uncomfortable truths of the world.

China is having an ewaste crisis with heavy metal pollution in their ground water, because their "recycling" is really just getting paid by other countries to dump it somewhere else.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25242606/

And that's why they closed importing recycling from other countries so many places in the US are getting rid of their recycling containers because it's all going to a landfill anyways.

"Reduce" and "reuse" are the only parts of the motto that are relevant anymore.

Recycling is definitely relevant, it's just the primary problem is infrastructure not getting individual people to use a different colored bin.

If it's in groundwater, you can harvest the metals back up by engineering plants with genes from the ZIP family.

ZIP genes are responsible for metal uptake in plants, and with proper modification they can be made to pull raw metals out of groundwater, both repairing the local ecosystem and allowing the metals to be harvested for further use.

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I really need to put a lab together.

Can I come work in your lab when you're up and running? Sounds fun.

I'm off to research ZIP genes

Having a cost effective solution is better than governments needing to spend tens of billions a year to take care of the problem.

They complained about lithium ion batteries not being recyclable. Well there is a revolution going on right now as everyone realized that it’s cheaper to recycle batteries than mine new materials. Once someone figured out that you could freeze the batteries with liquid nitrogen and pulverize them into powder the rest was easy.

The same thing happened with PV panels. All of a sudden it is cost effective to shred, pulverize them and separate the powders with electrostatic equipment.

Many first world nations are now building the recycling and disposal costs into the purchase price of electronics so the recyclers have government funding and a valuable waste stream.

Heavy metals or just typical ones like iron and copper?

Heavy metals, yeah. Silver, mercury, lead, nickel, cadmium, there's even a few naturally occurring species that can pick up Uranium

Neat

I assume it's still easier to prevent the pollution than clean it up.

Haha I was referencing something Florida did in the 70s. They just tossed tires in the ocean.

Plenty of people recycle. In fact too many people recycle. Plants are over loaded and cannot process all the recycled waste so they send it to a landfill. Many things are impossible to recycle anyways like plastic film and Styrofoam.

That's pretty much what my comment said.