Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2018 March 29

= March 29 =

Solar panels
I just read that solar panels have a life expectancy of 20 to 30 years. After this time, can the panel be recycled completely into another panel, like for like. Or are new materials required to replace any expended ones from the old panel? If so, I guess solar panels aren't really renewable? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.242.209.68 (talk) 09:07, 29 March 2018 (UTC)


 * Silicon-based solar panels (the most common type) have good potential for recycling with 90-95% of the materials being recovered in existing processes. However, the recovered glass and silicon is usually sold for use in other industries as the recycling process introduces too many impurities to be easily used in new solar cells.  At the present time it is more economical to refine new raw silicon to the required purity than it is to recover it from recycled solar panels.  That might change in the future, but at the moment one generally doesn't recycle solar cells with the aim of creating new solar cells.  Dragons flight (talk) 09:25, 29 March 2018 (UTC)


 * The general concept is called downcycling and it's very common. The opposite, naturally, is upcycling. Recycled material is less pure than original material and may not meet the same needs as before. For example, recycled fine paper may get downcycled into newspaper which gets downcycled into toilet tissue. Matt Deres (talk) 12:21, 29 March 2018 (UTC)


 * I have three anecdotes (my brother, my neighbor, and the company I work for) in which they paid to have the panels removed rather than sell the panels for recycling. The cost of removal was high enough that my brother strongly considered leaving the dead panels on his roof. 209.149.113.5 (talk) 13:01, 30 March 2018 (UTC)

Amateur archivists and data hoarders who amassed huge collections
I have read about Marion Stokes (40,000 VHS tapes), Vivian Maier (150,000 photographs), Henry Spencer (2 million USENET messages), Paul Mawhinney (3 million records), and I find their commitment really inspiring. Are there any similar examples? People who grew huge amounts of data throughout their lifes (I am aware of Jason Scott of Archive Team and Brewster Kahle of Internet Archive too). Regards and thanks. emijrp (talk) 21:48, 29 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Forrest J Ackerman is generally credited with amassing the largest collection of sci-fi memorabilia in the world. Our article doesn't really go into it, but there's a bit more here. Typing largest collection of into Google gives you no end of collections, from Star Wars to rubber duckies to garden gnomes. Guinness World Records would obviously have quite a lot of such items, for example: see this. Matt Deres (talk) 13:43, 30 March 2018 (UTC)


 * Norman Yarvin's http://yarchive.net is another significant Usenet archive. This was hand-selected, not a completist and automatic one. Andy Dingley (talk) 19:31, 30 March 2018 (UTC)