[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.