From pv magazine USA
Florida Power and Light (FPL), which is owned by renewable energy powerhouse NextEra, has spent the past two years mulching the cardboard boxes and wooden pallets used to ship solar panels.. The mulch is then applied on site.
It released images were of the ongoing process at a facility in McDavid, Florida. The Cotton Creek Solar Energy Center is the company’s standard 74.5 MW (AC) facility, with an estimated 200,000 to 250,000 panels installed, translating to roughly 90 MW (DC) to 120 MW. The site manager estimated that 9,900 pallets and cardboard boxes were used to deliver the solar panels.
Generally, trash removal from a facility involves paying for rented construction dumpsters to collect the material, plus the disposal fees of the garbage that fills the dumpsters. FPL’s project manager suggested that this project offsets costs by $180,000 per site, compared to a standard trash management process.
The new process saves approximately $130,000 per site, even after accounting for the $50,000 cost of renting the grinding machine. Apply that over the company’s goal of installing 30 million modules by 2030, and the company says they expect to save close to $10 million via this technique.
The utility’s environmental team researched the specific materials in the pallets and boxes. They chose products that would be in compliance with the US Department of Agriculture’s National Organic Program regulations on what can be mulched.
The company first tested the process at the Lakeside Solar Energy Center in 2019. Since then, they’ve repeated that process on 16 more sites, saving over $2 million in 2020 and 2021. The technique has become FPL’s standard disposal process for packaging.
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Those pallets should be reused as pallets, not ground up and used for compost. Crazy waste of resources.
The pallets or not a standard size we have tried to give them away on many sites you can give away a few not 10000 of them the commercial people won’t take them. This is a great idea it act a a weed control rather than using even more resources to bring in gravel
Agreed, either that or given to the local community for free, there’s a lot of uses for a pallet or two.
Grinding the pallets may have been cheaper than paying to have them removed, but as other commenters pointed out, that’s still very wasteful.