End-of-life of c-Si solar panels: demonstrating the possibility to reuse the cover glass

The cover glass in a silicon solar panel accounts for about 2/3 of the device’s weight and, at the end of life, these panels are expected to be recycled to reduce the industry’s environmental impact. The recycling methods often require the panel to be smashed, which splint the cover glass in low-value fragments. Here we demonstrated that the cover glass could be recovered unbroken through a mechanical process. Due to its chemical and mechanical strength, this glass would be ready to be reused without the need to melt it again, bringing by this way important savings of its energy content and carbon emission related to its production. The material would be ready to be used as cover glass in another solar panel or, still, as architecture material or another application. Besides that, we have utilized Fouriertransform infrared, Raman, and energy-dispersive spectroscopies to confirm the composition of the remaining components, as well as to identify aging. We confirmed that our study-case panel has a composition similar to most Silicon solar panels in the market, and the results indicated that it would be feasible to recover the glass in most of these devices and by this way reduce the carbon emissions of the photovoltaic industry by more than 2 million tonnes every year.