Australia’s energy and climate ministers have agreed to work towards establishing a national product stewardship scheme to prevent millions of decommissioned solar panels ending up in landfill, instead directing them towards remanufacture or recycling.
The country’s uptake of rooftop and large-scale solar has been impressive but the lack of an industry wide approach to collection and recycling of decommissioned solar panels means it looms as a landfill nightmare.
Annual solar panel waste volumes in Australia are predicted to nearly double over the next five years, from 59,340 tonnes in 2025 to 91,165 tonnes in 2030. Most of the waste will initially stem from residential solar installations but by 2035, large-scale solar farms are projected to contribute a greater share.
At the Energy and Climate Change Ministerial Council meeting in Sydney on Friday, state and federal ministers endorsed a paper presented by the New South Wales (NSW) government that advocates a national mandated scheme to proactively manage the solar waste challenge.
The ministers said they recognised the need for improved end-of-life management of solar panels, noting that “many are disposed of well before the end of their useful life and typically end up in landfill, stockpiled, or exported.”
“More than 95% of a solar panel is recyclable and contains valuable materials, including aluminium, glass, copper, silver and silicon, which can be beneficially recovered and reused,” they said.
NSW has been nominated to lead the preliminary work, collaborating with other jurisdictions to develop a regulatory impact statement while the federal government will work with the states to proof a national product stewardship scheme. NSW is to report back on its recommendations in early 2026.
NSW Energy Minister Penny Sharpe said the state is already developing a mandated stewardship program for batteries and the solar panel program will build off that.
“We are proud to be leading the charge to create a unified approach to solar panel waste management and recycling,” she said.
“This work builds on the momentum of our nation-leading reform on batteries, and the new legislation already in place in NSW to enable a mandatory product stewardship scheme, ensuring suppliers take responsibility for the safe design, recycling and disposal of their products.”
The Smart Energy Council (SEC) has welcomed the progress, saying that without urgent national coordination, that predicted mountain of solar waste will become a landslide.
“It’s been a decade since the federal government acknowledged solar panels going into landfill was a problem,” SEC Chief Executive Officer John Grimes said. “Now, four million panels are coming off roofs a year with less than 5% being recycled.”
“The time for talk has passed, an immediate first step is a national solar stewardship pilot to keep the industry alive and inform the regulatory impact statement.”
The SEC, which estimates that about one-third of decommissioned solar panels could be re-used instead of being thrown away, said a national stewardship scheme will allow solar waste to be leveraged to grow a domestic re-manufacturing industry.
“Right now, Australia is home to the world’s biggest critical minerals mine – solar panels sitting on rooftops, rich with materials like copper, silicon, aluminium and rare earths,” it said. “And we have the companies, that can recover 99% of the value from those panels.
“Without a scheme, we’re sending smart energy infrastructure to landfill, wasting not only valuable materials, but the opportunity to lead a new global industry.”
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