The Waste Management and Resource Recovery Association of Australia (WMRR) has strongly welcomed the NSW Government’s move to establish Australia’s first mandatory product stewardship scheme for solar panels, saying it can help create the scale and certainty needed to attract investment into Australian recycling, remanufacturing and manufacturing.
The NSW Government has today announced consultation on a mandatory scheme that would require solar panel brand owners to take responsibility for the end-of-life management of the products they place on the Australian market, helping fund collection, recycling and resource recovery to keep critical minerals circulating.
WMRR CEO Gayle Sloan said the proposal recognises a fundamental principle: those who design, manufacture and supply complex products must share responsibility for their entire lifecycle.
“Solar panels are precisely the type of complex product that shows why stewardship matters. We will not create a circular economy simply by finding somewhere to recycle a product once it becomes waste,’ said Ms Sloan. “Stewardship changes the economics. It creates the incentive to make products last longer, to design them for repair, reuse and recycling, and to recover valuable materials at the end of their first life rather than continually extracting virgin resources.”
The opportunity is substantial. NSW already has more than 1.18 million rooftop solar systems, while around 14,000 tonnes of solar panel waste is generated annually — forecast to rise to 89,000 tonnes by 2045.
But Ms Sloan said those numbers should be viewed as an economic and resource opportunity, not simply a future waste problem.
“Solar panels contain aluminium, glass, silicon, copper and silver. The question should not simply be how we dispose of tens of thousands of tonnes of panels. It should be: how much of that material can Australia keep circulating through our economy, and what industries can we build around it?”
CSIRO’s Critical Energy Minerals Roadmap makes the same connection. It identifies recycling as an important part of Australia’s critical-minerals opportunity because it can reduce the loss of high-value minerals, reduce reliance on virgin materials and create new economic opportunities associated with recycling. It also identifies designing technologies for easier dismantling, secondary use and material recovery as increasingly important.
That opportunity extends well beyond recycling. CSIRO has identified Australia’s potential to move beyond simply extracting and exporting minerals and instead capture more value through refining, processing and manufacturing. Its more recent work notes that demand for energy-transition minerals had already doubled over five (5) years to US$320 billion, driven by technologies including solar, wind and electric vehicles.
“Australia has the minerals, renewable energy, technical capability and growing stream of end-of-life products. What we need is policy that connects those pieces and creates sufficient certainty for businesses to invest here.
“Mandatory stewardship can help create that certainty. If businesses know panels will be collected, if recyclers know what materials are coming back and manufacturers know there will be reliable secondary material streams, we can start building the investment case for Australian processing and manufacturing.
“That is the difference between treating an old solar panel as waste and treating it as an Australian resource.”
Ms Sloan said this was why stewardship needed to look at the whole lifecycle, rather than merely paying for end-of-life collection.
“Collection alone is not circularity, and recycling alone is not stewardship. For complex products such as solar panels, stewardship must reach all the way back to design. It should drive longer product life, repairability, reuse, disassembly and material recovery, while ensuring those placing products on the market are responsible for what happens to them.
“NSW is showing what can be achieved when government is prepared to regulate rather than simply hope voluntary action will deliver.
“WMRR strongly supports Minister Penny Sharpe, MLC and the NSW Government for again demonstrating the leadership Australia needs on product stewardship,” Ms Sloan said.
“This is good waste policy, good resources policy and good Australian industry policy. Now we need the same ambition nationally.”