(Courtesy University of Newcastle)
Solar power is the conversion of sunlight to electricity through photovoltaic (PV) solar panels and one of the forms of renewable energy. In fact, solar power generated over 7 percent of global energy in 2024. That’s a lot of solar panels.
But what can you do with a worn-out solar panel? Trying to recycle the panels for precious metals like silver has been a difficult process, according to a news release from The University of Newcastle in Australia. Until now. A new approach safely and efficiently recovers 97 percent of silver from the panels.
Silver Contained in Solar Power Panels
Australia is a world leader in the use of solar power and has the highest solar capacity per capita. By 2050, the country will have more than one million British tonnes of used up panels. There is a very large amount of silver in those panels.
Currently, the silver recovery methods take many hours and rely on chemical-intensive methods that have environmental and safety risks.
That’s why researchers from the University set out to find a better way to recover the silver the panels contain. The team was led by associate professor Mahshid Firouzi, from the University of Newcastle’s Centre for Critical Minerals and Urban Mining (CRITIUM) and the results were published in ChemRxiv.
The new method they discovered combines mechanically crushing and grinding the old panels into fine particles and then using a flotation technique to float the valuable metals to the top.
“While froth flotation is widely used in mining to separate valuable minerals from ore, this is, to our knowledge, the first demonstration of froth flotation for recovery of metallic silver from recycled, ground solar panels – something many in the field believed was not feasible,” Associate Professor Firouzi said in the press release.
What Does it Mean Going Forward?
According to PV Magazine, the new method reduces chemical intensity and the generation of large amounts of waste. The results support a circular economy with a smaller footprint.
This could also address an ongoing supply-demand problem in the silver market. But silver is only the starting point. The researchers are also looking into the recovery of silicon from the worn-out solar panels. These efforts could also create jobs in resource recovery and manufacturing.
“Silver was our first test case, but there are likely significant opportunities to apply comminution, flotation science and hydrodynamic techniques to unlock billions of dollars’ worth of other metals and minerals currently trapped in urban and mining waste,” Firouzi said in the press release. “We cannot afford to let these valuable resources go to waste.”
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