Estimating direct human health impacts of end-of-life solar recovery

Studies have found that recycling photovoltaics at their end of life has significant potential for energy pay-back time reduction, resource savings, and environmental impact reduction. However, most of these studies do not consider the complexities of PV recycling resulting from lack of collection infrastructure, unavailability of advanced recovery technologies, and the geo-spatial dependence of both of these issues. This work combines geo-spatial modelling and statistics, collection logistics optimization, and environmental impact assessment in order to quantify the impacts resulting from collection, processing, and recovery of PV materials given current US solar installations, municipal solid waste and landfill infrastructure, and the networks between them. Results show that previous work may have underestimated certain environmental impacts due to transportation by an order of magnitude for the US case study. The treatment of a recycling resource credit significantly impacts these results. Using the avoided burden approach results in a net negative SO
₂
and NO
_x
emissions of up to 0.57 g SO
₂
per kWh and 0.039 g NO
_x
per kWh. Cumulatively, the avoided burden approach results in an net negative 14.5 PM
₁₀
eq g per kWh. If the assumption of the avoided burden approach are true, then recycling cancels out lifecycle emissions.