Many are only looking at solar panels in term of greenhouse gas emission in the production chain, while any kind of semiconductor processing will have a lot of chemical waste occuring.
Edit: Also, recycling solar panels isn't sraightforward at all because of heavy metals (e.g. Cadmium) being used as dopants.
No, most solar panels do not contain cadmium, and cadmium is not used as a dopant in any kind of semiconductor. Cadmium telluride is a semiconductor, and there are some thin-film solar panels that use it, but the market is dominated by silicon solar panels, which do not contain any cadmium. (CdTe is the most popular thin-film type, though.) Recycling CdTe is enormously easier than mining cadmium and tellurium from ore, so it won't be a problem. If I were doing it, I'd be more worried about the tellurium than the cadmium — that shit stinks in a way that gives new layers of meaning to the word "stench". Finally, "cadmium" is not a brand name; it is a chemical element and thus does not need to be capitalized. This isn't German.
> Excretion is mainly renal although small amounts of tellurium are exhaled as dimethyl telluride which has a distinctive garlic odour which may persist for many days; Reisert (1884) reported garlic breath odour for 237 days following ingestion of 15 mg tellurium oxide.
In short, you have managed to pack so many errors into under 20 words that it required an entire paragraph to explain most of them. Your epistemology is bad and you should feel bad.
Semiconductor process waste is a real problem (I used to work in an office where the old Fairchild Semiconductor plant had been, which I was told was the first Superfund site, though it wasn't) but it's actually a very manageable problem. It isn't inherent to the process in the way that CO₂ emission is inherent to burning coal, smelting steel, or making concrete, and it's orders of magnitude better than it used to be.
Edit: Also, recycling solar panels isn't sraightforward at all because of heavy metals (e.g. Cadmium) being used as dopants.