SMaRT input to Parliamentary inquiry into solar panel waste

Inquiry webpage

SMaRT submission as published

Core response

Given other submissions will primarily focus on the first points of the terms of reference, namely data on waste and recycling, and costs of landfilling, this submission will focus on reference points:

d. potential benefits to Australia of expanding onshore reuse and recycling of solar panels,
including for households, the environment, energy security supply chain resilience and the
economy, including the economic benefits of recovering solar panel resources (such as
glass, silicon, aluminium, copper, silver and other critical minerals)
f. barriers to reusing and recycling solar panels at scale in Australia, including technical,
commercial, regulatory or any other challenges
g. alternative policy options for governments to help overcome these challenges

But we will first anchor our response in relation to our research validating innovative,
effective recycling methods and technologies we have developed which would help to create
sovereign capabilities in relation to solar PV wastes which are growing rapidly and currently
are not subject to any meaningful recycling efforts nor at scale.

Research findings

Via “Rethinking circular economy for electronics, energy storage, and solar
photovoltaics with long product life cycles” paper published by Springer:

There are significant opportunities exist to recycle solar PV waste to create materials
circularity right here in Australia, now. This include ensuring for design for disassembly
through modular approaches, development of materials for substitution, fabrication efficiency
through novel selective synthesis of metals, high-throughput manufacturing of precision
devices, and manufacturing processes that enable use of recycled materials for use as
feedstock for remanufacturing and/ or export opporunities. Design efforts should focus on
current perceived limits in the degree of modularity, where parts can be made accessible for
replacement and consumer uptake of recycled product.

The conventional “linear” supply chain currently used by the manufacturing and consumer
economy synthesizes natural resources into consumable products and discards the products
at their end of life as waste.8 This linear process has proven to be untenable as the natural
resources are declining. There fore, closing the loop to attain a sustainable ecosystem for
the supply chain (using the principles of the circular economy) is important. The circular
economy helps to reduce dependency on natural resources, by making the economy selfsustaining
using a cascaded loop system to reuse waste as secondary resources.

Solar cells are predominantly composed of silicon, in monocrystalline and polycrystalline
form. Although these forms of silicon are the energy-absorbing units in photovol taic (PV)
solar panels, they constitute only around 4% of each module’s total weight percentage. The
most common materi als used in PV modules are glass (as a cover window) and aluminum
(used as an encapsulation frame for the panel). These materials can be recovered.

Recommendations

Extended product responsibility

Extended product responsibility (EPR) requires the product manufacturer to take extra
financial and physical responsibility to treat or dispose the post-consumer product. The
National Television and Computer Recycling Scheme for recycling of old computers and
television, which is an industry funded scheme, and supported by the Australian
government, comes under product stewardship programs rather than EPR. So, a clear EPR
policy is required to facilitate the producer and manufacturer to implement EPR for solar PV
in Australia. A product manufacturer already has a set material flow system used to deliver
finished products to the consumer, and the same chain can be used to redirect end-of-life
products to recycling facilities. Thus an extended manufacturer EPR is a more effective and
sustainable way to close the loop.

Developing recycling infrastructure and material flow system

There are several steps to be addressed before a circular recovery system for long-life-cycle
products such as solar PV is established. 

Most of the recycling techniques used for material extraction of long-life-cycle products are focused on a narrow spectrum of materials, which makes upscaling for large-scale adoption economically unviable. An integrated recycling approach that allows full recovery of component materials needs to be developed and
incorporated into the material flow system. There are already millions of tonnes of end-of-life
products generated each year, which manufacturers do not take responsibility for recovering.
These products still need to be handled using conventional distribution and collection
systems. The current solid waste collection and sorting facilities at the municipal level are
more suited to short-term products, such as plastic and domestic waste. 

Existing collection bins, transportation facilities, and sorting facilities cannot accommodate these products. The
limited amount of end-of-life product collection can be bolstered by increasing the number of
collection points provided by manufacturers and Councils. Manufacturers can set up
collection points in their retail centres, while large household appliances could be collected
from consumer homes on replacement.

MICROfactories: Distributed recycling

An innovative form of decentralised recycling system could also be developed to complement the existing centralised system. This decentralised system could take up the
small-scale material flow and use specific recycling techniques to ensure efficient material
recovery from the waste. Using similar principles of distributed recycling, the MICROfactorie
concept (discussed in the following section) can further assist in closing the material flow
loop for a sustainable circular economy. 

A MICROfactorie uses the concept of microrecycling where waste material can be treated on a small scale, so that it can be implemented into a distributed and decentralised system, in a modular basis, which can be
applied in a society level that adapts to the type of waste generated by the area. This over
comes the limitations of the conventional recycling system, by bypassing the need to have
collection centres and transportation infrastructure to transfer the waste material to recycling
plants. The UNSW SMaRT Centre has developed and commercialised various MICROfactorie Technologies.

The benefit of having microrecycling plants is that they can be adaptive to ever-evolving
product design and material composition and can be implemented easily, with fewer
resources and less economic pressure. The development of distributed recycling will also
support the distributed manufacturing concept, which has gained traction with the
introduction of additive manufacturing. Distributed manufacturing fed by a distributed supply
chain providing materials extracted from recycling will help create a sustainable economic
ecosystem, where the mate rial flow loop can be closed in an effective manner. 

Selective thermal transformation techniques implemented by the researchers from the UNSW SMaRT
Centre have shown that complex waste streams (including for solar PV waste) can be
recycled by extracting cop per- and tin-based alloys at different stages of thermal
transformation.

Sustainable design

The product can be designed to be easily recyclable, making the material recovery process
less resource-intensive, by incorporating sustainable design, proper material selection, and
manufacturing and fabrication techniques. It can be done by adhering to the concept of EPR
by the manufacturers with the development of different material fabrication techniques for
effective recyclability.

For PV panels, the types of material used have been predominantly
silicon, aluminum, and glass. This simplification in the material choice and design concepts
helps in developing an effective recycling technique and this trend can be adopted across all
product classes. The material extraction and recycling process of the long-life waste can be
further solidified by adopting modular designs to facilitate product reusability to help extend
the lifetime of the product. 

There has been an effort to make consumer products such as only the defective part of the equipment, rather than the whole device. This effectively reduces the amount of waste generated and keeps the material in the usable phase for a  longer time in the circularity. Similarly, for PV panels, there has been an approach for making ease-to-disassembly design improvement to make the dismantling and recycling
process convenient, and there has been a transition from wafer-based PV design to thin layer
design, which requires less semiconductor material and has more efficiency.

Advances in recycling techniques

Current recycling techniques are material-selective and can be used only for specific groups
of metals to be extracted from the waste. The approach of MICROfactories can help in an
integrated approach, but advancement and focus on large-scale adoption of this type of
technology is required with development in effective recycling techniques for emerging kinds
of products. Recycling of solar panels needs a large amount of pretreatment involving
manual handling for dis mantling of the solar panel to manually sort the frames, glass, and
the panels. It can be highly resource-intensive and ineffective when large-scale processing
needs to be done.

Via “Innovative hydrothermal technique in efficient disengagement of waste solar
panels” paper published by Elsevier’s ScienceDirect

UNSW SMaRT researchers developed a novel technique to disengage the glass from multilayered
materials embedded in the waste panels, which often go to landfill, waste stockpiles
or even incinerators due to a lack of effective and affordable solutions for removing the
adhesive between layers.

Key findings:

• Glass of waste PV was disengaged effectively using a novel hydrothermal method.
• Only water under high-pressure and low temperatures was employed in the method.
• The process positively impacts peeling off of other layers of the PV panel.
• Water used can be filtered and reused, minimizing wastewater generation.
• No deterioration in quality of recovered glass, encapsulants, and metals happened.

This novel, efficient method for disengagement of glass from the rest of the module used
water under high pressure and relatively low temperatures in a hydrothermal reactor,
allowing for facile separation of the glass from the interlayer.

The other layers of the module could also easily be peeled apart in subsequent processes.
Crucially, the separated glass was free of metals and polymers, so it could be utilised
directly for further applications as a feedstock for remanufacturing.

The benefits of this method include no use of chemicals, preservation of the recovered
materials' quality (i.e., interlayers, silicon sheet, and glass), relatively low-temperature
operation, no hazardous gas generation, and reduced energy consumption.

A pilot scale design of the method has been proposed for processing a full panel,
demonstrating its industrial viability.The study provides a pilot design plan for future scaling
up based on the lab-scale results.

This new method, an innovative solution presented in this research, has been demonstrated
to be effective for the efficient disengagement of a variety of PV panel brands.

The optimal conditions for the method have been established by tuning the temperature of
the liquid, type of media, volume of liquid in the reactor, and operation time.
The process only requires water as the liquid medium, which can be filtered and reused after
each cycle.

These advantages include:

• No production of hazardous or greenhouse gases
• Relatively low-temperature operation (<250 °C)
• Low operational costs as only water and heating elements are required
• No use of chemicals
• No deterioration in the quality of recovered glass, encapsulants, and metals
• Positive impact on peeling off other layers of the PV panel, simplifying the
subsequent upcycling process.

Via “Microrecycling of waste solar cells via an in-situ fluorine-generating thermal
treatment for high purity silicon recovery” paper published by Elsevier’s
ScienceDirect:

This study demonstrated a method for isolating valuable metals, including Si, Ag, and Sn,
from end-of-life solar cells, through a medium-temperature in-situ F-producing thermal
treatment at 550 °C followed by a chemical etching process.

The thermal treatment led to (I) the formation of uniformly distributed Sn-Pb alloy submicron
particles on the Si wafers' surface, and (II) in-situ generation of F and a significant increase
in the concentration of F atoms (by decomposition of Polyvinyl fluoride (PVF) back sheets)
on the wafers' surface up to 300 nm.

The infiltration of submicron particles and F atoms enabled the microrecycling of the cells by
diminishing the TiO2 corrosion-resistant layer atop the Si wafers. The subsequent two-step
etching, using a basic solution, firstly removed Al impurities within 3 min and facilitated the
liberation of 70 wt% of Ag strips from the wafers while avoiding Si loss.

The remaining Ag and Sn were extracted using the second etching stage via an acidic
media. The resulting purified Si wafers, with a high purity of 99.7 wt%, were then used to
produce β-SiC. This SiC possessed mixed sub-micron particles, nanoparticles, and nanowhiskers
coated with a SiO2 shell of thickness 2–3 nm, which is suitable for microwave
absorption applications. The microrecycling method presented in this study offers a
sustainable path toward minimising waste in recycling spent photovoltaic solar cells, building
on SMaRT’s existing R&D in relation to solar PV waste, inter alia.

Key Findings:

• Minimizing waste from obsolete PV panels by providing an upcycling process
• Recycling Si as a pure substance for advanced applications
• Recovering other elements present in PV panels, such as Ag and Sn
• Implementing a thermochemical process to reduce the carbon footprint of the
upcycling process; (V) producing highly value-added functional materials like SiC.
These objectives underscore the sustainable approach adopted in this study.

Barriers

The main barrier for industry in adopting circular actions currently is that there is little
commercial incentive for industry to adopt circular economy capabilities. As mentioned
above, using waste as a resource must be a central aspect of any strategy to develop a CE.
Companies also generally base their supply chains on the fundamental economic principles
of lowest cost and maximum convenience (or efficiency).

The Australian Government Implementation of the National Waste Policy Action Plan
presents seven national targets to guide investment and national efforts to avoid waste and
improve resource recovery to 2030 and targeted 80% average resource recovery rate from
all waste streams, but these targets will never be achieved without action from all level of
government in coordination, including new requirements around using waste as a resource.
Governments across the nation are far from being on track to achieve their worthy targets.
The UNSW SMaRT Centre has developed various technologies and innovative solutions to
enable a new era of ‘remanufacturing’ for metals that brings together waste resources and
builds a circular economy, and these sorts of circular economy-enabling technologies are
highlighted in the December 2024 final report of the Circular Economy Ministerial Advisory
Group presented to the Federal Government. The report (page 5) says: “Australian
businesses are ready to embrace and expand the use of circular goods and services, but
fragmented regulations across jurisdictions are holding them back. These inconsistencies
hinder growth, limit scalability and stifle productivity.”

“Harmonising circular economy rules will remove these roadblocks, streamline operations,
lower production costs and enable efficient national supply chains. This alignment will drive
demand for recycled materials, making them more competitive with virgin resources and
unlocking new opportunities for innovation, investment and economic growth. In the global
push towards a circular economy, Australia boasts world-leading innovators.”

“To ensure and multiply their success, we recommend government programs supporting
research and commercialisation include clear circular economy investment priorities.
Embedding clear circular economy priorities across these programs will create a strong
domestic investment platform, launching Australian innovators into a competitive position in
global markets, capturing more value. The circular economy also relies on collaboration
across entire supply chains, with groups working together to solve big challenges that single
businesses or innovators cannot tackle alone.”

Economic, social and governance (ESG) benefits of incentivised and innovative
recycling

The greatest opportunity for Australia is at the end portion of supply chains where we could
create a high-tech recycling industry to provide processed-ready (and environmentally
sustainable) feedstock for remanufacturing, including for the components and infrastructure
needed to have a viable clean energy industry.

In comparison with other developed countries, Australia is lagging in recycling and aligning
recycling with manufacturing. In much of the dialogue around sovereign capability and
manufacturing, using waste as a resource is either a missing aspect or it does not play a
central role. For our clean energy industry, high-tech e-waste and battery recycling enabling
these complex waste stream items to be taken back to their individual input materials so they can be used over again and again, should be central to the vision of creating a clean energy
industry.

In relation to minerals security and capability, recovering valuable materials from waste must
play a central role in helping to manufacture the components needed to electrifying the world
as we move towards renewable energies relying on storage and reducing our carbon
footprint. Many of the commodities and essential materials needed for this electrification are
being subject to record prices and supply constraint issues, but ironically society throws
away many of these materials in the forms of e-waste, for example.

A collaborative model needs to be adopted so industry has government regulatory and
funding support to work with researchers to do the R&D work needed to build the capability
to support a CE for solar PV waste. Mapping and planning of essential infrastructure is also
central to managing the immediate challenges facing the sector. Government and industry
have a role to play in planning and implementing adaptive and sustainable infrastructure and
related components (like for storage), with recycled content also to be used as feedstock,
which can facilitate the transition towards circular economy goals highlighted by government
strategies, actions plans and objectives.

Commercialisation of such technology / infrastructure will be slower than needed if left to
market forces alone. Incentives from governments (regulatory and financial) will accelerate
greater take up and rollout of existing capability across the value-chain. A circular economy
– or many localised circular economies – need a strong guiding hand including a range of
incentives and funding support.

• Households: Lower disposal fees suggest potential consumer cost savings; access to
refurbished panels reduces budget barriers.
• Environment: Recycling prevents hazardous landfill contamination and preserves
materials like glass, silicone, copper, aluminium, silver and critical minerals (e.g.,
silicon).
• Energy Security & Resilience: Onshore processing reduces dependency on external
supply chains, contributing to clean-tech sovereignty.
• Economic Growth: Recycling could yield AU$1 billion in recovered material value by
2035. https://apvi.org.au/scoping-study-solar-panel-end-of-life-management-inaustralia/
• Job Creation: New recycling infrastructure supports skilled employment in material
recovery sectors.

Policy options

• Mandated Product Stewardship: Implement national scheme requiring manufacturers
importers to ensure end-of-life management—mirroring NSW’s battery model.
• Recycling Levies/Incentives: Impose surcharges on new panel sales to fund
collection/recycling infrastructure.
• Standardised Pricing Mechanisms: Introduce tiered landfill bans and fee structures to
incentivise recycling over landfill.
• Infrastructure Investment: Provide capital grants for regional recycling sites and
mobile recycling units to reduce transport costs.
• Procurement Requirements: Mandate prefabricators and developers to use a
proportion of reused or recycled solar components.

• Support for Circular Innovation: Back R&D such as UNSW SMaRT Centre’s ongoing
work in this area to develop cost-effective separation, high-efficiency recovery, and
design-for-recyclability.
• National Data & Traceability Framework: Establish material inventories and labelling
standards to track panel lifecycle and recovery potential.
 

Yours sincerely

Stuart Snell
Head of Strategy, Stakeholders and Communication
UNSW SMaRT Centre