NREL researchers examine alternatives to recycling for solar, battery technologies

Alternatives to recycling may have the potential to build a circular economy for solar photovoltaic (PV) and battery technologies, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have discovered.

These alternative strategies include reducing the use of virgin materials in manufacturing, reusing them for new applications, and extending product life spans. The researchers found that creating a robust circular economy for PV panels and lithium-ion batteries could mitigate demand for starting materials and reduce waste and environmental impacts. Circular economy strategies also have the potential to create clean energy jobs and address environmental justice concerns.

“If you can keep them as a working product for longer, that’s better than deconstructing it all the way down to the elements that occurs during recycling,” Garvin Heath, senior environmental scientist and energy analyst and Distinguished Member of Research Staff at NREL, said. “And when a product does reach the end of its life, recycling is not the only option.”

The deconstruction process takes more energy and generates more associated greenhouse gas emissions to then build into another product than keeping the first product in use longer, Heath added. Heath and his NREL colleague Dwarakanath Ravikumar are lead authors of the 52nd annual Critical Review of the Air & Waste Management Association, titled “A Critical Review of Circular Economy for Lithium-Ion Batteries and Photovoltaic Modules — Status, Challenges, and Opportunities.” It appeared in the June edition of the Journal of the Air & Waste Management Association.

“People often summarize the product life cycle as ‘take, make, waste.’” Heath said. “Recycling has received a lot of attention because it addresses the waste part, but there are ways to support a circular economy in the take part and the make part, too.”

While recycling to recover the materials used in the technologies is preferable to discarding them in a landfill, Heath said the first priority should be to design a product to use less hazardous materials. The authors noted that there are currently no integrated recycling processes that can recover all the materials for either technology.

The researchers drew their conclusions after analyzing more than 3,000 scientific publications exploring the life cycle of the most common PV and lithium-ion battery technologies.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Manufacturing Office and Solar Energy Technologies Office funded the research.