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Reverse Assembly Directing Decommissioned Photovoltaic Recycling To Complete Low-Carbon Lifecycle
Yuting Wang1, Mingxing Huang1, Xuehong Yuan1
1State Key Laboratory of Green Papermaking and Resource Recycling, School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 800 Dongchuan Road, Shanghai 200240, People's Republic of China.
None:
Current global terawatt-level deployment of photovoltaics (PV), with still expanding installation, besides providing green electricity, is triggering end-of-life issues. The exponentially generated decommissioned PV has resulted in carbon intensification effects upon inefficient recycling, a contradiction to its original carbon reduction mission. Meanwhile, these wastes hold vast potential in constructing a closed low-carbon material loop in the energy-intensive PV industry, where advanced material recovery technologies with high efficiencies and low consumption are essential to complete the "waste-to-value" transition. Here, state-of-the-art methods for full-process PV recycling together with their bottlenecks are discussed, encompassing decapsulation, sorting, and metal extraction. By deconstructing PV recycling as a reverse assembly process, new potentials of carbon abatement and material circulation can be unlocked in building PV sustainability.
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