The European Environment Agency (EEA) published a document on Tuesday 24 August to shed light on what needs to be done to apply the principles of the circular economy to renewable energy technologies such as wind turbines, solar photovoltaic panels and batteries.
Deploying, maintaining and replacing this infrastructure requires significant resources, including many substances on the EU’s list of critical raw materials, the EEA points out.
However, due to the necessary energy transition, waste from end-of-life clean energy infrastructure is expected to increase 30-fold over the next 10 years.
According to the EEA, this shift to renewable energy technologies therefore poses a new waste challenge for Europe.
“The fast pace of technological development means that equipment can be subject to relatively rapid obsolescence and can generate complex waste streams, thus presenting technical and logistical challenges for managing this infrastructure at the end-of-life stage”, the Agency notes.
In addition, there are difficulties in recovering materials and reintroducing them into the production cycle: high volumes and materials that often have to be recovered from remote locations; design that does not consider end-of-life or recyclability; and the presence of hazardous substances.
However, the development of renewables also offers opportunities to reduce the consumption of scarce raw materials by recycling the resources, rare earth elements and other valuable materials (e.g. steel, copper and glass) included in the waste from the development and use of renewable energy infrastructure.
In the case of photovoltaic panels, for example, 95% of the materials can be recycled (90% for wind turbines), the EEA points out. On the other hand, the delamination, separation and purification of silicon from glass and semiconductor thin film for panel recycling represent real challenges, both in economic and technological terms.
See the document: https://bit.ly/3BcS9VX (Original version in French by Damien Genicot)