Comprehensive Design of Solar Photovoltaic Circular Economy for Non-PV-Manufacturing Nations

By 2050, globally accumulating waste from end-of-life solar photovoltaic (PV) panels will surpass 78 million tonnes as the global annual installations are exceeding predictions. PV dismantling and circular economy approaches are evidently appealing to countries that are leading PV manufacturing industries. Therefore, they confidently built PV waste management centers (PVWMCs). But what about the non-PV-manufacturing nations with large PV installations? This work presents a stable proactive long-term (2030–2075) solution through designing internal technical specifications and supply chain management of PVWMCs for two PV technologies. The proposed designs collect PV wastes then effectively store or dismantle them to output byproducts that can be stored or shared with non-PV industries; industrial symbiosis (IS). A Mixed-Integer Nonlinear Programming (MINLP) optimization model was created to balance multiple tradeoffs after projecting annual PV wastes. Results demonstrated the PVWMCs’ short- and long-term techno-economic profitability, controlled dismantling capacity, and linearized/stabilized materials’ supply, which was not achieved before.