The Benefits of Sharing—Nice Guys and Girls do Finish First - Open-Source Lab: How to Build Your Own Hardware and Reduce Research Costs - page 24

FIGURE 2.4 A schematic of an eight factory ecoindustrial park centered around a Gigawatt-
scale solar photovoltaic plant. The mutually beneficial material and energy flows are shown
that make up industrial symbiosis in the system.
The first factory (1) is a conventional recycling facility, which is used to source the glass
and aluminum needed to fabricate the solar cell from recycled materials (when viable) and
thus have a lower embodied energy (95% lower for aluminum and 20% for glass) [ 28 ] . The
raw glass from the recycling plant is fed to a sheet glass factory (2), which outputs cut sheets
of 3-mm-thick glass with seamed edges, which provides both substrates and potentially back
cladding for the PV. Finally, the glass is tempered for mechanical strength and the front side
is coated with a transparent conductor such as tin oxide, zinc oxide, or indium tin oxide to be
used as thin-film PV substrates [ 27 ] . The potential symbiosis of colocating the glass plant (2)
and the PV plant (4) while using recycled glass is shown in Figure 2.5 .