About two million Australian homes have solar panels on their roof and this is still a fast increasing industry due to the ever rising cost of electricity. We have just had severe early summer electrical storms and one of the damage factors was an unusually prevalent amount of hail damage. For the first time the nightly news has featured rooftop solar with gaping holes where hail the size of cricket balls has punctured panels.
People with insurance cover have the expectation that those damaged panels will be replaced, but that does raise the question of those old damaged panels finding their way onto the country's landfills. If that happens, we will be committing an act of serious pollution because solar consists of hazardous material such as lead, copper and zinc. We already have recycling in place to deal with discarded television sets and computers but until now there has not been a need to think of recycling solar.
Apart from the phenomenon of hail damage, solar has a working life capacity of about thirty years and some of our earliest use of photovoltaic electricity generation are close to reaching their " use by " date and their disposal is about to become an important question. There simply are no laws in place to regulate the disposal of redundant solar panels.
In 2011 the national television and computer recycling scheme required manufacturers and importers to participate in industry funded collection and recycling. It is now rare to see that type of material in an Australian landfill. In fact, the recovery rate of the metals used in their manufacture makes this recycling profitable and the very nature of solar panels suggests that similar rewards would be forthcoming.
A long time ago car tyres were dumped on landfills but now we are charged a small fee when replacement is due and those same tyres are shredded and make a valuable contribution to road base. In cases where disposal of potentially hazardous material is covered by a compulsory recycling scheme the recovery cost is compensated by the value of the parts recovered. A survey by the International Energy Agency suggests that recovery of material from photovoltaic panels could deliver a potential value of $15 billion by 2050.
Probably few people considering going solar take into consideration that the system they buy is likely to have a working life of about thirty years. But the efficiency of the panels is ever increasing and the price charged for a photovoltaic array is decreasing at an even faster rate. It is highly likely that existing panels will be scrapped far short of their rate of redundancy just to increase the power generated by the newer installations.
This hail damage is sounding an early warning. We need to put legislation in place to ensure solar disposal is by way of recycling or we will be faced with contaminated landfills. Such is the challenge that needs to be addressed in the creation of all new industries.
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