@Lyle @doonxib @db @sickburnbro yeah that's a double edged sword. on the one hand, the US has a bigger diy culture for stuff like that, compared to europeans which are total sticklers for regulation and 'certified installs.' Can go both ways. A lot of chinese cheap stuff flooding your markets too. But a major euro panel maker recently got bought out by a US firm and is moving production there. We'll see.


>It would be nice to see solar panels and wind turbines being recycled
I'd have to look into panel recycling in detail, but in principle, you need to consider that silicon is grown into huge crystals with massive energy investment, that's basically 90% of the material processing cost. Then you can make whatever you want out of the wafers, basically.
If you dump a bunch of heat into a 'broken' panel you could remelt it and make a new one. The question isn't can you do that, the question is why would you want to? There are >20yo panels still working just fine, and if they lose 15% of output you'd rather sell them to the third world and make a new one instead of incurring the cost of recycling.

Wind turbines ARE being recycled in Europe, that's simply not true.