That's a bit hand-wavy and optimistic. Li-Ion batteries are notoriously hard to recycle, not because the chemistry is hard, but because the logistics are hard in the face of such a wide variety of batteries in use. Maybe solar panels are more uniform, but the challenges of recycling some non-radioactive items are an existence proof of recycling difficulties.

> You can properly dispose or recycle anything non-radioactive with enough energy, heat and oxygen.

With "enough energy" you could recycle anything. In theory you could for instance vaporize any waste mixture (including radioactive compounds), send it through a giant mass spectrometer, and get output beams sorted by atomic number. But in practice, how much energy is "enough energy" is quite important to whether that process is realistic.

In this case, the relevant metric is how much energy is spent producing and recycling solar panels compared to the energy the solar panels are expected to produce over their lifetime. As long as that ratio can be made sufficiently low, we should be good.

Anything organic.

Apply as much energy, heat and oxygen you want to mercury and it’s still mercury.

You can bombard it with neutrons to produce (radioactive) gold, though.

https://journals.aps.org/pr/abstract/10.1103/PhysRev.60.473 (1941)

Haha, was going to post this as well, but thought it was too snarky :)

So few people know that the alchemists ended up being correct. (they just didn’t have enough energy at their disposal!)

Hey, clean baseline energy and mercury upcycling in one nuclear power plant? What's not to love!