Describing her work in solar recycling, Emilie O’Leary said “It’s a very common picture, when we go to a site that there’s hundreds, if not thousands, of materials that are either left over from the installation process or don’t get used. We come out, stack them, load them into the trucks and get them to the most convenient recycling facilities.”
“We” is O’Leary’s Green Clean Solar, established in 2022. O’Leary worked for a company performing mechanical installations for commercial PV projects from 2016 to 2022. “We … were fortunate to work with some of the biggest corporate companies in America,” said O’Leary. “We were on Amazon rooftops, Target stores … we built carports for FedEx, Blue Cross, Blue Shield … we worked for military bases, universities.”
The company was sold in January 2020 and O’Leary stayed on for two years as it went utility scale and tripled in size. She made numerous site visits.
“When you have large, utility-scale projects, you have a massive amount of waste – cardboard, plastic, pallets, panels,” said O’Leary. “Nobody knows what to do with it. And that really made me understand that there is a problem in our green industry … Even though we are promoting and building this green resource powered by the sun, we’re filling the Earth with all this waste.”
Now, said the Green Clean Solar CEO, “I am going back to these job sites … and I’m cleaning them up. I have found partners in the recycling world that had no idea there was all this waste coming from the solar industry.”
Logistics
Those partners recycle materials from cardboard and plastic to solar panels. Moving materials from project to recycling sites is costly, said O’Leary, and waste management policy is needed. The US recycling market, she said, is “honestly all over the place. There are no regulations, there are no standards.”
With the equipment that sorts panel components for recycling costing millions of dollars, established recyclers have an advantage. “There are companies who have been in the recycling game for years – perhaps through electronics, for example – suddenly realizing that they want to get into recycling solar panels too,” said O’Leary. “They can make all kinds of deals with their various downstream partners so pricing is very scattered.”
Entrepreneur O’Leary is trying to raise awareness of the solar waste issue.
“I’ve had conversations with the Department of Energy and I’ve been to Washington, DC, to speak about what we do,” she said. “I started this campaigning because I saw there was a big problem in our industry where nobody knows what to do and there is this huge amount of waste.
“We need some kind of incentive. Even taking the cost of trucking, trucking expense is just exorbitant. You’ve got the fuel, you’ve got the drivers, even getting them from point A to point B is expensive, so if we have some kind of incentive to subsidize that, or if there are incentives for companies like mine to fund that… We can’t compete with landfill cost, which is very cheap.”
Policy fear
The next US election looms in November 2024, however. “What I would be afraid of is that all the incentive, all that money would get pulled back, [would] get removed and reused in a whole different way,” said O’Leary. “I think it’s going to depend on who gets in there because, obviously, the Democrats are all about renewables. They’ve been pushing so much with all the manufacturing that’s happening here in the US that if it changes parties I’m afraid that money is going to be pulled back and we’re not going to be able to do what we want to do.”
Policy uncertainty aside, said O’Leary, solar recycling creates jobs. “I think a lot of these companies are finally getting on board to say, ‘You know what, we do need to spend some money to do the right thing”
“I’ve been in business for two-and-a-half-years, and I have seen the growth. We have tripled in size as far as the clients and the work that we do. So, again, the positivity coming out of all of this is that people want to do the right thing and they’re willing to spend the money to do it.
“We have so many great stories; we recycled over a million tons of metal that would have been thrown to landfill. That material is being repurposed to build a bridge.”
One Maui business repurposed panel packaging cardboard as fruit tree mulch.
“The more we do this, the more great stories we can promote,” added O’Leary. “My goal is let’s keep this going. We are on this rollercoaster ride and we’ve got so much we still have to do.”
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