Somewhere outside of Pharaslia on Route 23 in Chenango County I passed by this tired looking farm house with the paint mostly gone. While not particularly unique, still part of the landscape that might someday disappear.
Thursday August 27, 2020 — Chenango County — Ambler State Forest 🗺 — State Lands in Chenango County 🗺— PDF with All Maps 📚
When solar panels reach their end of their life today, they face a few possible fates. Under EU law, producers are required to ensure their solar panels are recycled properly. In Japan, India, and Australia, recycling requirements are in the works. In the United States, it’s the Wild West: With the exception of a state law in Washington, the US has no solar recycling mandates whatsoever. Voluntary, industry-led recycling efforts are limited in scope. “Right now, we’re pretty confident the number is around 10 percent of solar panels recycled,” said Sam Vanderhoof, the CEO of Recycle PV Solar, one of the only US companies dedicated to PV recycling. The rest, he says, go to landfills or are exported overseas for reuse in developing countries with weak environmental protections.
Even when recycling happens, there’s a lot of room for improvement. A solar panel is essentially an electronic sandwich. The filling is a thin layer of crystalline silicon cells, which are insulated and protected from the elements on both sides by sheets of polymers and glass. It’s all held together in an aluminum frame. On the back of the panel, a junction box contains copper wiring that channels electricity away as it’s being generated.
At a typical e-waste facility, this high-tech sandwich will be treated crudely. Recyclers often take off the panel’s frame and its junction box to recover the aluminum and copper, then shred the rest of the module, including the glass, polymers, and silicon cells, which get coated in a silver electrode and soldered using tin and lead. (Because the vast majority of that mixture by weight is glass, the resultant product is considered an impure, crushed glass.) Tao and his colleagues estimate that a recycler taking apart a standard 60-cell silicon panel can get about $3 for the recovered aluminum, copper, and glass. Vanderhoof, meanwhile, says that the cost of recycling that panel in the US is between $12 and $25—after transportation costs, which “oftentimes equal the cost to recycle.” At the same time, in states that allow it, it typically costs less than a dollar to dump a solar panel in a solid-waste landfill.
Roughly 200 feet south of Campsite 14 on Piseco Powley Road, past a small wetland there is a trailhead marked with a water bottle. This unmarked trail is roughly two miles back to the Gold Mine Stream Falls. This gentle set of cascades and drops has several small pools at the bottom with a gentle flow of water over the rock face. It’s a nice place to hike to and cool off on a hot summer day. Not as big as the Potholers and lacking the little deep pools or big waterfalls, it’s still a nice place to cool off on a hot day.
It is with great sadness that Save the Pine Bush announces the passing of one of its founders and long-time leader, Rezsin Adams.
Rezsin, born in Brooklyn on Feb. 13, 1927, died peacefully on Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2020, at the age of 93.
Rezsin met her husband, the late Dr. Theodore Adams, while attending college at the University of Rochester. After marrying in 1947, and receiving a master’s degree in physiology, Rezsin and her family moved to the city of Albany’s Center Square neighborhood in 1959.
Rezsin was a member of the activist community. Other than a few short jobs when she was younger, including running an art school in Buffalo and lobbying against nuclear power, Rezsin lived her life as the dedicated volunteer.
I've been doing a lot of research into tax maps lately. I noticed that the tax rolls contain coordinates for each point. So I decided to make a map up all of the 2019 Tax Exempt Properties in Guilderland, which shows all the municipal, state and private properties that pay no county tax. There are 388 properties in the town that fall under that category.