This story was written by Erica Gies with editing by by the SF Public Press and community-supported funding provided by Spot.us.

Clean-tech firms seek to reuse a variety of rare, potentially toxic materials. New businesses emerge as manufacturers prepare for modules' end of life.

In recent years the electronics industry has gained notoriety for creating an endless stream of disposable products that make their way at life’s end to developing countries, where poor people without safety gear cut and burn out valuable materials, spilling contaminants into their water, air and lungs.

Solar modules contain some of the same potentially dangerous materials as electronics, including silicon tetrachloride, cadmium, selenium and sulfur hexafluoride, a potent greenhouse gas. So as solar moves from the fringe to the mainstream, insiders and watchdog groups are beginning to talk about producer responsibility and recycling in an attempt to sidestep the pitfalls of electronic waste and retain the industry’s green credibility.

Solar modules have an expected lifespan of at least 20 years so most have not yet reached the end of their useful lives. But now, before a significant number of dead panels pile up, is the perfect time to implement a responsible program, said Sheila Davis, executive director of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition.

The nonprofit environmental group has been a leader in recognizing the problems of e-waste, including hazardous disposal sites in the Bay Area left by the semiconductor industry. Now it is focused on the solar boom in Silicon Valley. Last year the group published a report calling for a “just and sustainable” solar industry, and this year it issued a scorecard of solar companies. The scorecard evaluates recycling and extended producer responsibility for the product’s end of life, called takeback; supply chain and green jobs; chemical use and lifecycle analysis; and disclosure.

Vastly expanding industry

Solar energy is the most widely available resource we have. Every hour, enough solar energy strikes Earth to meet human energy needs for more than a year, according to NASA. Now the solar industry is poised for huge growth in the United States, thanks to policy changes, incentives, technological improvements and economies of scale. Solar photovoltaics have recently become less expensive than nuclear energy on a per-kilowatt-hour basis, according to a new report from Duke University. Also, solar is widely expected to reach cost parity with fossil fuels in most markets by 2013.

In 2009, Greentech Media estimated that U.S. solar demand will continue to increase about 50 percent annually through 2012. The report said the U.S. capacity installed during 2008 was about 320 megawatts, and it predicted that about 2,000 megawatts would be installed during 2012. Such growth would put U.S. capacity ahead of solar leader Spain and potentially Germany as well.

While most of the new modules will likely have a long, productive life, factory scrap, transport breakages and field failures are ready for recycling now. Jennifer Woolwich is collecting these broken solar modules in a warehouse near Phoenix.

She founded her company PV Recycling in February 2009 after estimating that she could harvest 500 panels a week from these sources. She is not yet collecting at that capacity, nor does she have enough panels to begin recycling them, but she is talking with solar manufacturers in an effort to win their recycling business.

“Of those we interviewed, 100 percent want recycling,” she said. “Eighty percent want an independent third-party doing the recycling.”

Woolwich said she has seen a quick evolution in solar manufacturers’ attitudes toward recycling: “Last year, there was kind of a ‘wait and see, we’re not sure how this is going to work’ attitude. Over the past 12 months, I’ve seen a 180. I’ve seen companies who are hiring consultants to research their whole value chain to identify waste, including the end of life of modules. We’ve received calls from consumers asking us which companies have takeback programs in place.”

Solar companies tend to be secretive about their product recipes, making some manufacturers cautious about, yet conceptually open to, third-party recycling.

“We guarantee that intellectual property will not be put at risk,” Woolwich said. “We’re not interested in reverse engineering or selling company secrets. We have certificates of destruction that we [will] provide.”

For now, though, some companies are doing their own recycling.

SolarWorld, which received an 88 out of 100 on the toxics coalition’s scorecard, has been recycling its own panels since 2003 at its main factory in Freiberg, Germany. That factory now receives broken panels from its U.S. plants in Cabrillo, Calif., Hillsboro, Ore., and Vancouver, Wash.

“The fact is, there isn’t much to recycle,” said Ben Santarris, a spokesman for SolarWorld. “In the future we might expand recycling to our U.S. plants or contract with a third-party recycler.”

First Solar earned a rating of 67 on the scorecard. Headquartered in Tempe, Ariz., it has recycling facilities at its manufacturing sites in Perrysburg, Ohio; Frankfurt (Oder), Germany; and Kulim, Malaysia. Lisa Krueger, vice president of sustainable development, said that so far the company is primarily recycling manufacturing scrap.

“It’s our intention that there would be other recycling facilities worldwide as you get into those volumes,” she said.

Materials of interest

Solar modules employ a variety of technologies, and even models within the same technology can have different ingredients. These materials may or may not be classified as toxic depending on who is regulating them.

Dustin Mulvaney is a scientist who works on solar issues at the University of California, Berkeley, and serves as a consultant to the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition. He has analyzed solar modules currently on the market and has outlined for each its key ingredients, including potentially toxic elements and materials that would be valuable to recover in recycling.

Used in SolarWorld modules, crystalline photovoltaic is the oldest and most widespread solar technology in the United States, holding 57 percent market share in 2009, according to Greentech Media. “As far as hazardous materials go, you’re primarily talking about lead,” Mulvaney said.

A thin film technology called cadmium telluride makes up about 21 percent of the U.S. market. First Solar panels use this technology.

Cadmium may be carcinogenic. Exposure affects the lungs and kidneys and can be fatal. “It’s gene toxic and a mutagen, so it has the ability to affect DNA, meaning it could affect reproduction and future generations’ DNA,” Mulvaney said. (Continued...)

Related posts:

1. Intel’s 8 New Solar Projects Raise the Bar on Tech Industry
2. Solar Industry: Solar Could Meet 15% of US Demand by 2020
3. Largest Solar System in the Wine Industry

It is often the case that when a policy is observed as effective in one city, state or country, other governmental bodies will adopt that policy, or some iteration of it, because they have already had the benefit of witnessing the policy experiment in action. Political scientists call the phenomenon policy diffusion and it usually applies to like units when they share information at conferences and use other traditional means of policy knowledge transfer (i.e cities with cities, states with states, etc.).

But what do they call it when a policy adopted in one major city then spurs the creation of a business and a market solution to an environmental problem in a city 3,000 miles away? I'm not sure there's a name for that yet, but it's exactly what happened in the case of New Hampshire entrepreneur Rian Bedard. After Bedard moved from San Francisco where composting is required by law. Taking what he knew about the San Francisco program, Bedard was inspired to try to bring curbside composting to the Portsmouth, New Hampshire area. And in November, he and a friend started the company EcoMovement.

EcoMovement hauls only their clients’ compostable waste, leaving garbage and recycling to the local hauler, Waste Management.  They then take those organics to two local facilities, where they are composted, turned into valuable soil amendments and sold to landscapers and farmers. Restaurants pay based on the amount of waste they produce.

"We try to reduce the rate, because we think it’s unbelievable what most of the companies are charging," Bedard told National Public Radio. "And we want people to be incentivized, not only by the cost savings, but by doing this for the environmental reasons. So we just looked at their overall costs and reduced it by 15 to 20 percent."

The more successful EcoMovement becomes, the less money the local hauler, Waste Management, will make. But company officials maintained that they do not view EcoMovement as competition.

In fact, Waste Management's Bay Area composting program in the Bay Area is essentially what Bedard modeled his New Hampshire business after, with one key difference. Waste Management's massive commercial composting operations in California were a direct result of state and local policy drivers -- the regulatory landscape mandated it.

In EcoMovement's case, there are no laws on the books requiring restaurants to compost and as a result, the startup currently has about 30 businesses under contract for compost removal. But as long as they offer to haul compost for a price point that is less than the previous arrangement, the company will continue to grow, policy drivers or not.

[Disclosure: Timothy Hurst has been a paid writer at Waste Management for other projects but received no compensation for this post.]

H/t: NPR
Photo: WordRiddenvia flickr

Related posts:

1. San Francisco Adds Nearly $4M to Energy Efficiency Program
2. Electric Car Charging Networks Popping Up Across U.S.

The Cubs have partnered with Solo Cup Company, Allied Waste, Free Green Can and Levy Restaurants to introduce the new "Real Fans Recycle" program at Wrigley Field. Fans can now recycle all of their plastic cups in specially-marked bins throughout the park.

The new recycling program will also extend beyond the 'Friendly Confines,' with 25 dual-purpose (recycling/trash) recycling cans now installed surrounding Wrigley Field, providing year-round public recycling opportunities for Cubs fans and residents of the Wrigleyville neighborhood. The Free Green Can will accept recycle glass, plastic, paper and aluminum at one station.

In addition to the 'glassware' that will be a little bit greener at Wrigley, fans will also be using 100 percent recycled napkins, compostable plates and cutlery.

"This can be a model for what other sports venues across the country can achieve," said Kim Frankovich, vice president of sustainability, Solo Cup Company. "Cubs fans can help us make this program a success by putting their plastic cups and bottles in the recycling bins separate from other trash."

In total, the Chicago Cubs and its fans are expected to divert roughly 165,000 pounds of cardboard and plastic material from the waste stream annually, saving an estimated 2,180 cubic yards of landfill space.

Once recycled, the plastic cups will be used to make plastic lumber for picnic tables and park benches, carpet fibers, clothing, automotive parts, paint brushes and, of course, more plastic cups.

Hat tip: Recycling Today
Photo: BrentDPayne via flickr

Related posts:

1. Company Improves Cardboard Box Recycling by Avoiding It
2. Solar Waste Recycling: Can the Industry Stay Green?
3. Target Opens Recycling Centers in All 1,740 Stores

About 95 percent of old corrugated containers can be recycled into new paper, but the remaining unusable fiber goes into a mill's waste stream. And for International Paper's Cedar River containerboard mill in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, which produces 1 million tons a year of recycled paper for packaging made from old corrugated containers, that is a lot of valuable fiber that goes unused, until now.

International Paper, one of the largest paper companies in the world, is partnering with Maryland-based Fiberight to take 50,000 tons of residual fiber waste each year from the Cedar Rapids containberboard mill and turn it into fuel-grade ethanol.

Fiberight began accepting residual fiber at a converted corn ethanol plant 25 miles west of Cedar Rapids at the beginning of May. They hope to finish their first batch of ethanol later this week.

"Everyone from the average household to large industrial manufacturers is focused on reducing waste. But the reality is that there will always be a significant waste stream in this country," said Fiberight CEO Craig Stuart-Paul. Fiberight says the residual fiber waste from International Paper provides excellent base-load feedstock for the biorefinery and that the resulting fuel represents an 80-percent reduction in carbon emissions as compared to gasoline.

Fiberight will also begin to accept other household organics at its new facility and after separating, use those organic materials as feedstock for what Stuart-Paul calls, "trashanol."

When fully operational, the company hopes to produce 6 million gallons of ethanol per year.

Photo: Jason Cartwright via flickr/CC 2.0

Related posts:

1. Ethanol Industry Calls for Country-of-Origin Fuel Labeling
2. Coca-Cola Unveils Plant-Based ‘Bottle of the Future’
3. Where the Rubber Meets the Pallet

Image via CNN.com Click to enlarge.

Shawn Saylor of Hillcrest Saylor Farm in Rockwood, Pennsylvania has saved $200,000 by taking what most Dairy Farmers regard as waste and turning it into energy.  With the use of a Methane Digester, Saylor takes his dairy cows manure, cultivates it and harvests the methane.  The methane is then used to power a generator that provides electricity for his farm and enough to sell back to the energy grid.

Digesters have been in use in the US since the 1970's but they never really caught on in US agro industry because of the high cost of implementation and the low cost of fuel.  Since energy prices have been on the move in the last couple years, more farmers are turning to the process.  Traditionally the digester equipment costs around $1.7 million dollars, but Saylor was not happy with the current digester designs and implementations so he set out to build his own.

Funded by a $600,000 grant from Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection and Native-Energy, a carbon offset company that purchased the off-sets that the digester would produce over the next 20 years, Saylor was able to begin construction in early 2006 and complete the system later that year.  After being in service for over 2 1/2 years, Saylor claims that between the energy savings and selling the excess energy, this process is worth $200,000 a year in savings and revenue.

On top of the financial savings, Saylor is preventing most of the greenhouse gas Methane from entering the atmosphere.  The process is also better for his soil.  The digester produces an almost pathogen free, pH neutral fertilizer that doesn't require any processing or lye treatments to fertilize his feed crops.  Furthermore, Saylor reports that the process removes almost all of the smell usually associated with a cow farm.

Saylor isn't stopping there.  By using the excess heat from the digester to process his excess feed stock and feed stock waste into biofuels he will completely close the loop on his operations, becoming completely energy independent and realizing even greater cost reductions.

Cattle and dairy farms have come under a lot of heat lately because of the amount of waste they create, greenhouse gasses they emit and energy they use.  Hillcrest Saylor Farm has become a model of innovation for the industry demonstrating how profitable being environmentally sound can be.  There are currently 135 digesters used in the US (mostly on Dairy Farms) and now that Saylor has shown that they can not only reduce costs but generate revenue I suspect we'll be seeing more and more of them.

Sources: CNN, Boston Globe, Popular Mechanics, ReGeneration, greenUPGRADER

Related posts:

1. Solar Waste Recycling: Can the Industry Stay Green?
2. Apple Cutting Waste (and Price) with iPad 10-Packs for Schools
3. Beyond Borders: Big Waste in the Book Industry