When Green Is Not Necessarily Just

On photovoltaic waste and justice as practical philosophy

The solar panel has become an image of the green future.

It lies on rooftops, in solar farms, and across landscapes in many parts of the world. It captures light and turns it into electricity. No smoke rises from it. No chimney. No heap of coal.

It can almost look like energy without waste.

But the solar panel also grows old.

After perhaps 25 or 30 years, it has to be taken down. At that point, it no longer consists only of the promise of clean energy. It consists of glass, aluminium, silicon, copper, silver, and other materials that must be dismantled, transported, recovered, or discarded.

And so an old question appears in a new form:

Who receives the benefits — and who carries the burdens?

A study published in Nature in August 2026 examines precisely this problem. The research team combines, among other things, material-flow analysis, life-cycle assessment, economic modelling, and scenarios for future energy development, and evaluates 1,708 possible recycling scenarios across 32 regions.

The researchers estimate that the world could accumulate between 297 and 402 million tonnes of decommissioned solar panels by 2060. These panels contain valuable materials such as silicon, silver, and copper, while improper waste management can also lead to toxic metals such as lead and cadmium leaking into soil and groundwater.

Photovoltaic waste is therefore not merely a technical problem. It is also about resources, economics, technology, and the way advantages and disadvantages are distributed between countries.

That makes it a philosophical problem.

The difficult word justice

We use the word easily.

A just wage. A just distribution. A just society. A just climate transition.

But what do we mean?

Is an arrangement just if it creates the greatest possible total benefit? Or if the benefits are distributed as evenly as possible?

The two do not necessarily coincide.

This is precisely what the Nature study reveals. If solar waste can be transported to places where the technology is best and treatment is cheapest, the world as a whole may gain greater economic and climate benefits. In the most advantageous scenarios, the researchers estimate cumulative net economic benefits of between 529 and 936 billion US dollars and greenhouse-gas reductions of up to 3.32 billion tonnes of CO₂ equivalent by 2060.

That sounds immediately sensible.

But the benefits are not necessarily distributed as evenly as the waste.

The most advanced recycling technologies are concentrated in regions such as Europe, the United States, China, Japan, and South Korea. Many low-income regions lack both the technology and the industrial capacity to carry out comparable processing themselves.

This creates a paradox: a system can become more efficient and at the same time more unequal.

Aristotle and who gets what

Aristotle distinguished between different forms of justice. One of them was distributive justice: the question of how benefits and burdens should be divided among people.

That question is surprisingly contemporary.

Photovoltaic waste is not only about where tonnes of glass and metal end up. It is also about who receives the profits, who carries the risk, who owns the technology, and who gets the opportunity to develop the knowledge that makes them less dependent on others.

A country may benefit greatly from solar energy today and, a few decades later, be left with large quantities of obsolete panels without the capacity to process them safely.

Then it is no longer enough to ask:

Does solar energy work?

We must also ask:

For whom does it work — and on what terms?

This is where practical philosophy begins. Not primarily with the abstract question of what justice is, but with the question of what it means to act responsibly when benefits, burdens, and power are unevenly distributed.

The greatest benefit or the fairest distribution?

Here we encounter an old philosophical tension.

A utilitarian way of thinking will naturally ask which solution creates the greatest total benefit: the most recycling, the greatest economic return, and the largest reduction in emissions.

The Nature study shows that this can, to some extent, favour concentrating recycling where the technology is already most advanced.

But the researchers also identify a clear trade-off between maximizing total benefits and distributing those benefits more evenly. When recycling is spread more broadly between regions, the distribution becomes more balanced, but the total economic and climate gains become somewhat smaller.

At that point, it is no longer merely a calculation.

How much inequality are we willing to accept if total benefit becomes greater?

No technical model can answer that question on its own. A model can show us the consequences of different choices. But the judgement about which consequences we should accept belongs to another language.

A normative language.

A philosophical language.

Rawls behind the veil of ignorance

John Rawls proposed a famous thought experiment.

Imagine that we were asked to design society’s basic institutions without knowing what position we ourselves would occupy in them. We do not know whether we will be rich or poor, strong or vulnerable, or whether we will be born in a country with advanced recycling technology or in one without the economic means to build it.

Rawls called this the veil of ignorance.

How would we then design the system?

We would probably hesitate to create arrangements in which those who already possess technology, capital, and market power automatically receive the greatest share of the benefits.

Rawls’s difference principle does not reject inequality as such. Inequalities may be justified if they also work to the advantage of those who are worst off.

This provides an interesting perspective on photovoltaic waste.

It is not in itself unreasonable that some countries possess more advanced technologies than others. What matters is what that difference leads to. Does it help less advantaged regions gradually develop their own capacity, or does it lock them into dependence?

The Nature study points precisely toward technology transfer, funding, and the building of local recycling capacity as important parts of the solution.

That moves the question from distribution alone to something more fundamental: the possibility of participation.

From assistance to participation

There is a difference between compensating someone for a disadvantage and enabling them to participate in the system that creates the value.

If poorer regions only receive financial support while knowledge, patents, industrial facilities, and technological expertise remain concentrated elsewhere, some inequalities may be reduced without changing the underlying dependence.

The study shows how difficult this is. Subsidies can reduce disparities, but not every support scheme does so. The researchers find that relatively strong support in the early stages, followed by gradual withdrawal as recycling becomes economically viable, performs better than permanent support. Some subsidies tied to high carbon prices may, by contrast, increase disparities because they tend to favour regions that already possess advanced technologies and established carbon markets.

This is an important point far beyond the solar industry.

A policy may be intended to reduce inequality and nevertheless intensify it.

Good intentions are not the same as good consequences.

And perhaps it is only when people and societies gain a real possibility to develop their own knowledge, capacity, and agency that we can speak of something more than redistribution.

Phronesis — wisdom under imperfect conditions

Here Aristotle returns.

He used the word phronesis for practical wisdom. The practically wise person cannot simply follow a rule or maximize a single goal. She must understand the situation, see which considerations are in tension, and judge what is good to do under concrete and imperfect conditions.

Photovoltaic waste illustrates this well.

We cannot simply say that as much waste as possible should be sent to wherever treatment is cheapest. That may maximize overall benefit while at the same time concentrating economic and technological power.

But neither can we simply insist that everything must be processed locally. The researchers show that this may reduce the total economic and climate gains because advanced technologies are not available everywhere.

Practical wisdom therefore does not consist in finding one principle that solves the problem.

It consists in holding several considerations together: efficiency and equality, global benefit and local capacity, present needs and future independence.

That is not a weakness of practical philosophy.

It is its field of work.

The green transition also has a reverse side

We often tell the story of the green transition as a movement from the dirty to the clean.

From coal to solar power. From oil to wind. From emissions to sustainability.

But no technology is without a material history.

The solar panel requires minerals, energy, factories, and transport. And one day, it too becomes waste.

The green transition therefore does not abolish the old questions of power and distribution. It relocates them.

From the oil well to the mine, from the power station to the factory, and finally from the solar panel on the roof to the place where it is dismantled.

Who cleans up after the light?

This is perhaps what I am left with after reading the study.

The solar panel captures the light of the sun.

But light, too, casts shadows.

Not because solar energy is wrong. It is an important part of the effort to reduce global emissions. The problem begins if we start to believe that a technology is automatically socially good because it is environmentally green.

A genuinely sustainable transition must also ask who gets to participate, who carries the burdens, and whether those who are weakest today will have greater freedom of action tomorrow.

The researchers call the goal an equitable future.

The solar panel does not give us the answer to what such a future should look like.

But when it is one day taken down from the roof and becomes waste, it forces us to ask one of philosophy’s oldest questions again:

How should we live together so that both the goods we create and the burdens they bring can be carried in a way we can call just?

And perhaps that is precisely what practical philosophy is for.