Quote Originally Posted by Bohandas View Post
I'm gonna say we should recycle and/or refurbish. The article says outright that a big part of the problem is that current recycling efforts aren't large enough.
The efforts are small because the volumes are tiny. It's only in the last 20 years that people have started to install the things on any significant scale, and they have a lifetime ~25 years, so the number of panels currently reaching end of life per year is tiny. You'd be crazy to build a big, expensive facility for that volume of business.

But as the volumes ramp up, that calculus will change. In five, ten years, it'll be a different story. And by then there will also have been progress in recycling technologies, which would make a plant built today look outdated anyway.

Ideally, I'd like to see a dedicated storage facility for panels retired today, with appropriate incentives - stick and/or carrot - for people to deliver them there, where they can be stored until the infrastructure exists to reprocess them efficiently. But I wouldn't anticipate it being needed much more than ten years.