Queenslanders could be banned from dumping solar panels in landfill, as the government looks at how it can nudge industry into dealing with the problem.
Under the draft e-products strategy, solar panels could be banned from landfills within a decade.
The government is also proposing to spend $250,000 on a “pilot of an industry-led Solar Stewardship Scheme”. The pilot will investigate who might be able to handle recycling and where the best locations are, and how to go about collection, recovery and recycling, with a focus on rooftop panels and regional development.
The pilot is part of the Queensland government’s $1.1 billion fund to establish a recycling industry in the state and divert 80 per cent of waste from landfill by 2030.
Smart Energy Council acting CEO Wayne Smith says the pilot will set up a committee of industry and government representatives to will look at the economic and logistical obstacles that prevent recycling.
“The committee will meet monthly during the trial period to share advice, data and learnings to help inform a possible future Solar Stewardship Scheme,” he said in a statement.
Solar panel waste about to overwhelm
The size of the national solar panel waste problem, and the possible recycling opportunity, is enormous.
The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) says Australia will be throwing out 10,000 tonnes of rooftop PV solar panels a year by 2025 and something between 30,000 tonnes and a whopping 145,000 tonnes by 2030 when utility-scale solar farms, where panels have a longer life span, begin to replace their equipment. By 2040, that figure hits 450,00 tonnes.
Macquarie University expects the nation-wide cumulative figure to hit one million tonnes by 2047, or the equivalent of 19 Sydney Harbour bridges.
Despite this, Australia does not yet have mandated PV panel recycling schemes like those in Europe, which force producers to have take-back and recycling schemes for panels, and only Victoria has a policy that relates to PV waste, a law that forbids e-waste from being sent to landfill.
Victoria also promised in October to spend $10 million on developing solar panel recycling in the state.
In 2021, then federal environment minister Sussan Ley gave the industry 12 months to sort out an industry-led recycling scheme, but nothing came of this.
Queensland the biggest contributor to solar waste
Queensland environment and science minister Meaghan Scanlon says the state is keenly aware of the problem.
The state is expecting its own solar panel to explode by 2030, from not quite 1,000 tonnes in 2019 to 17,000 tonnes.
It pipped NSW for most small-scale solar, with 928,819 panels installed between 2001 and 2023 compared to 851,123, according to the Clean Energy Regulator’s most recent data on March 3.
A total of 3.4 million small-scale systems have been installed around the country since 2001.
“With the highest rooftop solar penetration in the country, we need to explore how we deal with panels when they reach the end of their life,” she said in a statement.
“We know that like other forms of e-waste, there is huge potential for parts to be recycled and in some instances repaired instead of ending up in landfill.
“We’ve seen industry is keen to get involved, now it’s just a case of how.”
Solar recycling a budding industry
At least eight companies in Australia are focused on solar panel recycling — Lotus Energy, Reclaim PV, PV Industries, SolaCycle, CMA Ecocycle, Solar Recovery Corporation (SRC) and Ecoactiv — but they are clustered mainly in NSW and Victoria.
Scipher Technologies is the largest licensed e-waste recycler in Victoria and won $1.7 million from the NSW government to build a solar panel recycling facility in the Albury area.
Yet the Queensland government’s pilot is not the only solar panel recycling trial happening in the state.
SRC has three sites in Queensland, in Townsville, Biloela and Brisbane with each facility expected to take up to 180,000 panels a year.
Reclaim PV received a $130,000 grant in late 2020 from the Queensland government as part of the Resource Recovery Industries 10-Year Roadmap and Action Plan, and said in late 2021 it had approvals to build a recycling plant in Brisbane that was supposed to be running by the end of that year.
RenewEconomy has reached out to Reclaim PV for comment.
The shortage of local locations for solar panel recycling in Queensland has been an expensive problem, historically, says Planet Ark Power CEO Peter Newland.
“Following hailstorms in Brisbane a couple of years ago we had to send damaged solar panels to Sydney for recycling at a cost of $3000 per pallet. To develop a local recycling industry in a state that has installed more solar panels than any other in Australia is a very welcome addition to Queensland’s clean technology sector,” he said.
