recycling costs are generally more than the economic value of the materials they recover. And bankruptcies have been all too common in an industry that has relied so heavily on disappearing subsidies.
Maybe the schoolkids are right to protest about their futures but for all the wrong reasons. The green dream is an eco-nightmare.
By Duggan Flanakin ~
For decades, the solar industry benefited from generous federal, state, and local subsidies to increase its footprint. Yet these generous subsidies ignore the costs of disposal of solar panel waste.
Things may be changing. In May 2018, Michael Shellenberger, a Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment” and Green Book Award Winner, wrote in Forbes that the problem of solar panel disposal will explode with full force in two or three decades and wreck the environment because it is a huge amount of waste which is not easy to recycle.
Shellenberger was citing comments, published in the South China Morning Post, from Chinese solar expert Tian Min, general manager of Nanjing Fangrun Materials, a recycling company in Jiangsu province that collects retired solar panels. Tian called his country’s solar power industry “a ticking time bomb.”
This is not really news. The Associated Press had reported in 2013…
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[…] to save it), efforts to improve health being manifestly undermined by increasing energy poverty and toxic “green” solutions to a non problem; pushing green imperialism and racism whilst our cities are overpopulated by […]