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> leaking toxic materials What toxic materials?

• imtringued 6y ago
  It's selection bias. For example, the truth may look like this: The majority of new solar panels use zero toxic materials. Old solar panels installed decades ago had toxic materials until the introduction of a ban that banned these toxic materials. A small minority of solar panels are thin film panels and they use cadmium. However, since we have started with the "solar panels are bad" bias we are trying to look for evidence. Selection bias results in a search for "solar panels toxic materials": The problem? People are mostly getting rid of problematic solar panels in the first place. Regular solar panels can be easily recycled, you extract the glass, the aluminum, the silver, the lead free solder and sometimes even the wafers and then you are left with some residual problem materials, things like leaded solder or unrecycleable thin film cells. Those things make the news, grab the clicks and give the appearance that all solar panels are like that, because those articles aren't there to present reality, they are there to lie by omission and misrepresent so that their readership has one more story that fits in with an overall narrative, no matter how misguided that narrative is.
• ivanhoe 6y ago
  Mostly the impurities coming from contacts and support materials, according to [1] primarily As, Cd, Hg, Se,Pb, Zn, Co, Ni, Mo, Cu, Cr, Sb. "In the course of the work, it was found that the toxicity indices of the EVA and Tedlar® components increase with prolonged exposure to materials in aqueous solution, approaching values characterizing an unsafe degree of toxicity to the environment and human health." [1] https://www.e3s-conferences.org/articles/e3sconf/pdf/2020/21/e3sconf_iceppPrague2020_01085.pdf https://www.e3s-conferences.org/articles/e3sconf/pdf/2020/21...