Reverse Assembly Directing Decommissioned Photovoltaic Recycling To Complete Low-Carbon Lifecycle

Current global terawatt-level deployment of photovoltaics (PV), with still expanding installation, besides providing green electricity, is triggering end-of-life issues. The exponentially generated decommissioned PV has resulted in carbon intensification effects upon inefficient recycling, a contradiction to its original carbon reduction mission. Meanwhile, these wastes hold vast potential in constructing a closed low-carbon material loop in the energy-intensive PV industry, where advanced material recovery technologies with high efficiencies and low consumption are essential to complete the "waste-to-value" transition. Here, state-of-the-art methods for full-process PV recycling together with their bottlenecks are discussed, encompassing decapsulation, sorting, and metal extraction. By deconstructing PV recycling as a reverse assembly process, new potentials of carbon abatement and material circulation can be unlocked in building PV sustainability.