Yesterday, I attended an online event hosted by the State of Green, located in Denmark! As a non-for-profit, founded in 2008, they are focused on building international relationships with solution providers fostering a green transition.
With the focus on Circular Economy, the symposium was inspiring and informative.
Do you know what a circular economy is?
It is a new way of thinking how we share our worlds resources while eliminating the strain of the planet by creating a new economic model. This model tackles global challenges like climate change, waste, pollution, and biodiversity. The traditional linear economy business model extracts natural resources from the earth, creates single stream products which at the end of their life cycle end up in a landfill or our oceans. The circular economy goes beyond the recycling approach and strives to create a system that diverts waste from landfills by means of building relationships with suppliers and end users while creating new incentives and technologies to avoid waste within our systems.
In a recent blog, I spoke about the problem of many unrecyclable wind turbine blades reaching the end of their life cycle. Until recently, a manufacture adopted a circular economy approach and designed the blades to be recyclable. Much like the wind turbine blades, our large-scale aging solar panel infrastructure is facing the same fate. We must consider how the social behaviors fit into the big picture. Allowing consumers to be the early adopters and become a part of the waste stream solution will accelerate the adoption of a circular economy. To achieve this, manufactures, installers, PV owners and recyclers must work together for it to be economically viable.
Here is a staggering estimate: By 2050, the total waste from all obsolete solar panels can weight upwards of 10 million metric tons which is the equivalent of 30-Empire State Buildings…
If we are to rid the many problems, we face today related to climate change, we must achieve a circular economy. There is no other option!
Now is the time to jump on board and be the change. Spread the knowledge as knowledge is power!