[suneilp]

Arsenic, cadmium, lead, polyvinyl fluoride, and probably more. There are indeed liquid based solar panels. The toxicity of solar panels both in their production and their usage has been reported on a great deal. Some companies are making changes to make them safer but I have no clue how far along those efforts are.

Solar farms are hurting the ecosystem when they break and leak out. Even if they aren't liquid based, solid state versions have thin films which contain some chemicals like cadmium and arsenic. Cadmium telluride has been introduced more recently has it is safer.

[pjc50]

This comment is a weird mix of truth and untruth. Yes, there's a lot of toxic chemicals involved in solar panel production, as there is in IC production and a whole load of other production processes. http://www.solarindustrymag.com/issues/SI1309/FEAT_05_Hazard...

Liquid solar panels are simply not a production-ready technology. There are no commercial liquid solar cell farms. Installed solar panels are solid. They're not particularly prone to corrosion and 'leaking', and are >99% silicon with trace amounts of boron and phosphorous. CdTe is actually nastier.

Solar farms are hurting the ecosystem when they break and leak out

[citation needed]

[URSpider94]

Glad to see that someone else responded, so I'm not alone here ... this is mostly nonsense. I have NEVER seen a report on toxicity of solar panels in use from "leakage", if there is such a thing, please post. Yes, solar panels contain elements like Cd and As, so do many of the electronics that you carry around in your pocket, and as long as they are bonded inside a semiconductor, they are basically inert slices of rock. However, most commercial solar panels today are silicon-based, with these other elements as dopants at a tiny percentage. A CdTe solar panel would be made of, well, Cadmium and Tellurium, both of which are pound-for-pound thousands of time more toxic to humans than silicon !!!! (though still basically inert slices of rock if they are in solid-state solar panels).

Admittedly, as with all e-waste, we need to look to what happens to solar panels when their life is up and they are landfilled or, hopefully, recycled. That said, over its 25+ year useful life, a solar panel will prevent tons of coal from being burned, which in and of itself would release a non-zero amount of cadmium and other heavy metals into the atmosphere.