Perovskite, the new solar panel wonder material will put lead everywhere where there are solar panels in a few years. Carbon nanotubes have asbestos like disease causing properties. Nanotubes are hailed as the new semiconductor material and as having many other wonderful applications. DDTs and PCBs all started out as wonder chemicals.
Science marches on.
PCBs are fine. It's sealed in transformers. There's an empty lot downtown near me where a substation used to be and they can't build anything on it. A whole city block paved over with a fence around it that will never be used for anything again.
Asbestos is fine, it's stuck in the walls, or it's in break pads nobody is inhaling, etc. However, many large industrial companies slowly went broke over decades because of asbestos lawsuits as cancer linked to asbestos slowly killed 10s of thousands of former employees.
Luckily lead is not as toxic as those two, but these panels are going to break in hailstorms and such and slowly leach. They'll get piled high in landfills in developing countries, etc. Always got to keep all that in mind.
Asbestos brake pads release particles as they wear down. Asbestos in construction is just pushing problems down to the next generations who will have to deal with the stuff when renovating.
Same for PCBs, they don't degrade naturally and will persist long after the components they're in have reached EOL. They'll get taken care by the lowest bidder and disappear for decades until they surface back and become everybody's problem.
Lead is just as toxic but affects the central nervous system instead of lungs or giving you cancer.
They are already very common. Go look at the California water board's statewide map of underground pollution. Essentially every site that ever was or is a gas station or dry cleaner has restrictions from ever becoming a home, school, day-care, or other similar uses. Anywhere you see an empty lot on a busy corner in a California city you can make a fair guess that it was a gas station.
