Clean Energy: Solyndra abandons hazardous waste at manufacturing sites

The “clean energy” company Solyndra has a dirty new problem — hazardous waste abandoned at its manufacturing sites.

The Fremont Fire Department’s Jay Swardenski oversees the cleanup. He said some materials, such as cadmium, are toxic, and hard to dispose of.

“They don’t degrade at all, so we want to make sure we don’t allow these materials to get into the environment,” he said.

It’s not just the leftover hazardous materials, but also the machinery used to apply them to the glass tubes. “Certainly those tools will need to be decontaminated, cleaned up, handled correctly as they are taken apart,” he said.

Swardenski told CBS 5 the disposal process is going smoothly in Fremont, but what about nearby Milpitas? Solyndra leased a building on California Circle for the final assembly of its solar panels. But the cleanup at the leased building in Milpitas is in limbo, because Solyndra doesn’t want to pay.

CBS 5 found the building locked up, with no one around. At the back, a hazardous storage area was found. There were discarded buckets half filled with liquids and barrels labeled “hazardous waste.”

It would seem that “clean energy” isn’t clean, would it?

Posted in

Dave in EH

7 Comments

  1. GdavidH on April 30, 2012 at 7:57 pm

    Where’s Algore or any enviro-whacko protest?when you actually need them?

    Can’t wait to see this on the evening news.?



  2. dairyair on April 30, 2012 at 8:02 pm

    Gee, what a shocker! Bottom line is Soyndra is a COMPANY, and companies want to make money. Maybe if they made a product they could sell, they wouldn’t have taken millions of taxpayer dollars–OUR dollars–and skipped town. When a company can figure out how to make money off green energy the old-fashioned way–by building a cost-effective product that people want–you may finally see it make money. It is called capitalism.`



    • PatRiot on April 30, 2012 at 8:38 pm

      Capitalism is too slow.? Besides, there may be the influence of philanthropy there ( Bill Gates) to cause guilt and cut into profits.? Theft is much quicker.? Just a Hollywood fascade, some DC snake oil salesmen and?American taxpayer money is necessary.
      And from Lisa Jackson??and her EPA friends – crickets.



  3. Dimsdale on May 1, 2012 at 8:56 am

    So the end result of “green energy” is brown fields?? And a half billion dollars to boot.? Now add the cleanup costs, and what is the payback for these solar panels?? A negative number no doubt.



    • Dimsdale on May 2, 2012 at 1:02 pm

      Whoops!? This was supposed to go with the “getting bin laden” post.? Sorry!



  4. Tim-in-Alabama on May 2, 2012 at 7:40 pm

    Solyndra lied. Nature died.



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