Abstract
In times of climate change and dwindling fossil resources, the need for sustainable renewable energy technologies gains importance, increasingly fast. However, the state of the art technologies are energy intensive in their production, like monocrystalline photovoltaic, or even consist of not recyclable composite material, in the case of wind turbine blades. Despite a lack in efficiency and stability, dye sensitized solar cells (DSSC) have a high potential to supplement the state of the art green energy technology in future. With low production costs and no necessity for toxic compounds DSSCs are a potential product, which could circulate in the loops of a circular economy. Therefore, with this paper, we provide the status of research on DSSC recycling and an outlook on how recycling streams could be realized in the future for glass-based DSSCs without toxic components. The overview includes work on using recycled material to build DSSCs and extending the life of a DSSC, e.g., through rehydration. We also illustrate the state of sustainability research for DSSCs using the VOSviewer tool. To date, the term sustainability appears in 35 of 24,441 publications on DSSCs. In view of the global challenges, sustainability should be researched more seriously because it is as important as the efficiency and stability of DSSCs.
Highlights
In order to reduce the temperature rise of the global climate, energy from renewable sources plays an important role [1]
Applying the concept of the circular economy, there is an opportunity to design dye sensitized solar cells (DSSC) in such a way that they can be recycled at the end of their useful life
DSSCs are leading photovoltaic technology when it comes to environmental aspects
Summary
In order to reduce the temperature rise of the global climate, energy from renewable sources plays an important role [1]. Similar to the price decline in the photovoltaic market, the prices for industrially manufactured DSSCs will fall [7] Thinking ahead, this material will eventually end up in recycling processes. DSSCs with the highest efficiency are using materials like ruthenium, cobalt, silver and platinum [3], which are toxic or scarce [11] These DSSCs pose high risk to people working with the cells, the environment in which they will be used and at the end, the toxic waste must be disposed of. We only use materials for our DSSCs that are non-toxic and abundant [12,13,14,15] These cells could be reused and recycled and pose no danger to humans or the environment. DSSCs must be designed to be non-toxic and to be able to be broken down into materials that are as pure as possible
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