Lead Sulfide (PbS), Cadmium Telluride (CdTe) and Cadmium selenide (CdSe) etc. are not safe for environment but still have widely been used in solar cells. So what are the reasons behind it? Why people are not thinking about environment friendly materials?
Actually, people are thinking about environmentally friendly materials a lot. But replacing a material with very specific properties is not that easy, especially if you want long-term stability for your systems. Cadmium Chalkogenides are pretty well-investigated so people know what they have to do in order to give their device the properties they require.
If you compare inorganic semiconductors, which pretty often are toxic to some extent, to the potentially friendlier organic pendants, you have to acknowledge that inorganics have had quite the head start so the organic community still has a lot to catch up.
The question is how to weigh the benefits between the toxicity of solar cells and practical use (overcoming the energy shortages).
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