Someday all of this garbage, at quantities of millions of tons, will need to be hauled away:

Pedro Amado Petroli, Priscila Silva Silveira Camargo, Rodrigo Andrade de Souza, Hugo Marcelo Veit, Assessment of toxicity tests for photovoltaic panels: A review, Current Opinion in Green and Sustainable Chemistry, Volume 47, 2024, 100885

From the article's conclusions:

Critical minerals are essential to national and global security and prosperity, with supply chains vulnerable to disruption. (1) The 2022 Critical Minerals list for the United States (U.S.) (2) identifies 50 mineral commodities, of which rare-earth elements (REE), platinum group metals (PGM), and indium are most frequently identified as critical, globally. (3) Other countries also have critical minerals lists, with overlapping and contrasting commodities to the United States. (3) These commodities are associated with elements across the periodic table, and are used in a wide array of applications, including green energy, communications, defense, and consumer electronics. Yet for many of the critical minerals, only limited information is available about environmental occurrence, distribution, mobility, and potential adverse effects on ecosystem and biota health.e.g. (4−7)

Because the U.S. Critical Minerals list (2) originates from a legislative mandate, “critical minerals” is a general term that is not strictly technical. The list includes a combination of elements and minerals; for this research prioritization effort, for tractability, we will discuss the primary element of interest associated with each mineral and will refer to them as “critical elements” (Table S1).
Increasing recovery and use of critical elements can enhance mobilization, environmental distribution, and exposures, with unexplored or unanticipated effects on biota and ecosystem health. For example, mineral extraction and processing often increase initial element concentrations by orders of magnitude in recovered concentrates or wastes, compounding the potential for harmful environmental release and exposure. However, the effects of increased exposures are difficult to predict because of substantial data gaps in geochemistry, bioavailability, and toxicity for many critical elements. At the same time, understanding the behavior of critical elements during processing and in wastes is the first step in improving their recovery and minimizing environmental impact. Given the large number of critical elements (∼50 on the most recent U.S. list (Table S1)) and the growing urgency to increase production, how do governments, regulators, scientists, and industries identify research priorities to help ensure that critical elements are recovered, refined, used, reused, and disposed in a sustainable, environmentally responsible manner?

A few studies have prioritized elements for research based on a single topic area (e.g., criticality, health impacts) using criteria such as geographic origin of current supplies, availability of alternative resources, anthropogenic disturbance of natural elemental cycles, and data availability for biomarkers and health impacts. For example, in determining which elements should be placed on the U.S. Critical Minerals list, Nassar et al. (1,8) developed metrics for essentiality and vulnerability to supply chain disruption by which they could prioritize criticality...

...More than 1,200 publications published through March 2023 were categorized into 11 review categories (Figure 2 and SI References). Of the critical elements considered, zinc had the 14th highest number of reviews (49), and indium the 34th highest (22). This ranking would elevate indium’s priority for study (Figure 3). There are more zinc reviews focused on “Bioavailability/Toxicity” than any other category, whereas the “Geochemistry/Geology” category was dominant for indium. Both elements are missing representation in the “Microorganisms” category, which encompasses reviews focused predominantly on microbial-element interactions. The distribution of review articles across the critical elements likely has been driven by factors such as known human and environmental health effects, technological and industrial use, as well as historic economic value...

Figure 2. Review papers published through March 2023 for each of the critical elements listed on the 2018 and 2022 U.S. Critical Minerals lists (2,20) (Table S1), arranged by category defined by this study. A complete list of references for this figure are in the SI, obtained from the Web of Science Core Collection database.