“A very real risk of breaking:” Councils demand solar recycling as they face avalanche of panels into landfills

Sending old solar panels to landfill is an unfair burden on ratepayers who have to foot the bill for Australia’s throw-away culture, says the head of the country’s local government organisation. 

Councils are beginning to fear how they will handle the expected 50 million dumped solar panels by 2035 if a stewardship scheme isn’t implemented within the next few years, says Gladstone mayor and Australian Local Government Association president Matt Burnett.

“That volume of panels carries a very real risk of breaking our municipal waste services,” he said at a public hearing on Monday for the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Climate Change, Energy, Environment and Water inquiry into solar panel reuse and recycling.

“These costs are not just about [an] unfair burden on ratepayers. Without tight regulation and investment, impacts of waste on local communities sends the message that net zero transition does not prioritise community outcomes.

“We need a coordinated, funded, well-regulated national approach to PV panel decommissioning.”

The hearings this week come as the suspension of the solar panel recycling pilot hits its third month, as revealed exclusively by Renew Economy.

The pilot was supposed to start last month and set up 100 collection sites around the country, as well as pay a gate fee for each panel delivered, but was suspended in mid-May after a complaint about the start-up process.  

Solar recyclers are devastated by the delay, which will also have an impact on the development of a stewardship scheme that formalises where waste PV panels must go and how they’re handled. 

Any delay in the stewardship scheme will have very real consequences for council budgets around the country, Burnett says. 

“In the absence of a national approach, local government will shoulder an unfair burden of disposal of solar panels, whether that’s in landfill, dumped by the side of the road, or facing stockpile risks for their communities,” he says. 

“The buck stops with local government. Communities rely on local councils to take care of their waste. Councils protect their local environment and community health, and step in when other systems fail.

“This is not a future challenge on the horizon; it is here now.”

Currently, those council-run landfills look cheap because the gate fees don’t reflect the value of the resources in solar panels, such as silver and aluminium, and because the manufacturers don’t pay for collection and processing costs.

While Burnett is buoyed by the fact that the federal government has promised, and budgeted, $24.7 million for the recycling pilot, he also says the scale up needs to happen fast to get ahead of “the panel avalanche.”

The federal Department of Climate Change, Energy, Environment and Water (DCCEEW) also needs to take responsibility for making it national, rather than allowing states to choose their own adventures. 

The local government association wants a mandatory national model so there is consistency across the country for people wanting to dispose of old solar panels, and for recyclers.

That means closing loopholes that exist today, such as people circumventing Victoria’s ban on dumping solar panels in landfills by sending them into New South Wales (NSW) instead.

“If you’re in Victoria and you have panels, you can either get them recycled there and pay for that, or you skip over to NSW which is not that hard… and you can dump them there much [more cheaply] than you would be able to get them recycled in Victoria,” says Environmental Solar Recycling Australia cofounder Chris Mohen. 

“That is just too easy if that’s an option.”

He told the inquiry that a future scheme must be national to prevent people picking and choosing different jurisdiction’s rules.

Mohen, whose business is in collecting old solar panels to on-sell to recyclers, says a $10-12 fee for disposing of these is likely to be fair and not add too much to the ultimate payer, who will be the solar developer or home owner.

* This story has been updated to show that 50 million panels (~1 million tonnes) are expected to be dumped in 2035, not 50 million tonnes.

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