According to the World Economic Forum, unlike many consumer electronics, solar panels:

“…have a long lifespan that extends 20 to 30 years. In fact, many panels are still in place and producing from decades ago. Because of their longevity, solar panel recycling is a relatively new concept, leading some to wrongly assume that end-of-life panels will all end up in the landfill. Although in its early stages, solar panel recycling technology is well underway.”

This is really good news, because with the rapid increase in solar installations around the world there is a glut of old panels coming in the relatively near future, and simply throwing them into landfill is not a sustainable course of action. In fact, around 90% of solar panels that have reached the end of their useful life are currently ending up in the city dump.

Now, a crop of innovators are responding to the challenge of solar panel recycling. It’s challenging because a panel is composed of many different materials that are all laminated together, and separating them into their useful components is complex and expensive.

One of these companies is Solarcycle, which says that its electrostatic technology allows it to extract 95 percent of the high-value metals from solar photovoltaic panels such as silver, silicon, copper and aluminum. The glass itself is also recyclable, and all of these materials are recovered by removing the aluminum frames, pulverizing the panels, and then sending them through a series of electrically charged rollers that cleanly separate each component.

So if you were holding off on installing solar because of sustainability concerns, it looks like human ingenuity has solved that problem. Head over to the YellowTin Platform today and see how much you could save by going solar. Then check out the Marketplace section, which allows you to get custom quotes from local installers.

The future looks bright when you’re using YellowTin!