Mulvaney presents Labor, Land, and Waste Across the Life Cycle of Solar Power
Dustin Mulvaney is presenting a webinar on Wednesday, Dec 8, 2021 to the IEEE’s Santa Clara Valley Sustainability Chapter on Labor, Land, and Waste Across the Life Cycle of Solar Power. Registration is free and open to the public.
Abstract: Solar power is fast becoming a major source of electricity around the world. As deployment rises to terawatts levels, these industries will drive demand for specific materials, natural resources, labor, and lands with solar energy resources, reconfiguring socio-ecological relations. Global change from the development of solar power commodity chains includes increased demand for minerals and metals such as quartz, copper, bauxite, cassiterite, and silver, new places for metallurgy and smelting, shifting workforce flows, occupational safety challenges from extractive industries to semiconductor manufacturing fabs, increased emissions and effluents from specialty chemical industries, conservation and agricultural land use change, and questions around the safe and responsible disposal at the of end-of-life. This talk identifies critical research areas that need attention along solar power commodity chains based on socio-ecological arrangements produced by the global solar energy industries over the past decade.