Environomical approach towards end of life management of solar photovoltaic panels

The Thesis details the Environomical approach towards End of Life Management of crystalline silicon solar PV panels in India. An Anticipatory Life Cycle analysis was performed to realize the environmental economic approach on India’s first PV recycling pilot facility developed by the SWAP project, compared to other established PV recycling methods reported in the literature. Anticipatory life cycle analysis (a-LCA) is performed on nascent technologies with higher degrees of freedom. Upcoming technologies are elastic to environmentally and economically optimized changes proposed by LCA. These types of analyses enable more proactive decision making. The futuristic scenarios for a-LCA were validated by a comprehensive stakeholder survey on End of Life Management of Solar PV panels. The goal of the conducted a-LCA is to visualize an efficient, economic, and eco-friendly process flow/stream for end of life management of Solar PV panels. To showcase the need for end-of-life management of Solar PV panels in the context of material security, a raw material criticality analysis is performed for India and at the global level for the targeted PV installations demand up to 2050. The thesis also assesses the potential locations for EoL PV panel management centres in India by creating a stakeholder map that details the projected waste generation sites across the country and the potential downstream material recycling capacities available in the countr