The bureaucratic costs of recycling

Christopher Booker used to note this about lead acid battery recycling here in Britain. But today’s example comes from India:

India has 11 similarly vast solar parks, and plans to install another 39 across 12 states by 2026, a commitment to a greener future.

Yet this solar boom has a downside: the waste it generates from the panels, made of glass, aluminium, silicon, rare-earth elements; as well as power inverters and wiring.

One minor piece of pedantry, solar panels do not contain rare earths. But, you know, sigh. Solar panels are made of things though, when the solar panels are end of life, those panels then need to be dealt with. Perhaps reusing, or recycling, those things in those panels is a good idea?

Protocol dictates that solar waste from the plants must be transferred to e-waste contractors, authorised by the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB), within a specified timeframe, typically 90 or 180 days.

Oh what a good idea. Lots of lovely bureaucracy.

Because authorised e-waste contractors are often unwilling to handle the waste in accordance with the CPCB protocol, a network of informal operators – who dismantle, aggregate, transport and recycle panels – have stepped in to fill the gap.

What a lot of really lovely rules and bureaucracy.

Tayyab* and his family work at the tail end of this waste-management chain. In a dimly lit and poorly ventilated room in Bengaluru, the 20-year-old and his younger siblings spend their days dismantling broken panels for their valuable metals and other materials.

“I take apart the metal frame, separate the glass and sort out different metals that can be sold separately,” says Tayyab.

Some work outside the rules and the bureaucracy.

Tayyab’s story is just one among many in the informal solar-waste sector, where workers find ways to extract value from the under-regulated but booming renewable-energy sector.

Ah. So the things that are valuable are extracted and reused or recycled. That’s good. But it can only be done by those not obeying the rules and the bureaucracy - for the costs of the rules and the bureaucracy are greater than the value of what can be extracted.

Which does lead to a thought. Say there’s something you wish to have done, something you wish to encourage being done - say, the recycling of the valuable bits of solar panels. The way to do it would appear to be having few rules and no bureaucracy, so as to lower the cost of recycling solar panels. Humans do more of cheaper things, less of more expensive - so, lowering the costs of recycling solar panels will increase the recycling rate of solar panels.

Anything we’ve missed there?

Kill bureaucracy to save the planet. Sounds good to us.