Solar Industry Must Exhibit Integrity To Manage Waste

• Jan Clyncke of PV Cycle discussed the state of solar module recycling today during TaiyangNews Solar & Sustainability conference on March 30, 2023
• He believes the fact that solar modules come with an average of 20-year performance guarantee is itself a sustainable aspect of the industry
• The PV community needs to track panels, establish technical criteria to comply with government regulations to ensure their recovery, recycling and reuse
• PV industry also needs to have a moral compass to ensure used panels do not end up in low-income countries and are instead recycled

As the world is increasingly adopting solar power to meet its electricity and decarbonization needs and is in need of  gigantic volumes of PV panels to be installed and dismantled over the years to come, PV Cycle Managing Director Jan Clyncke believes the preparation to recycle these starts from this moment on.

A pioneering European non-profit that voluntarily takes back solar panels to win back their input materials, PV Cycle says it offers tailor-made waste management services for the PV industry that also include legal compliance services for companies and waste holders around the globe.

Speaking at the TaiyangNews Solar & Sustainability Virtual Conference on March 30, 2023, Clyncke discussed the status of solar module recycling.

He pointed out that the PV industry currently does not produce as much waste since panels usually come with a 10-year product and 25-year performance guarantee. This in itself is a mark of the industry's sustainability which it should be communicating to the world at large. On the other hand, today this is simply too little for the existing recycling industry.

Yet at the end of this period, the world will be looking at mountain loads of panels entering their end of working life. Clyncke believes several manufacturers are already preventing waste during the production process using various environment friendly technical processes.

What the industry also needs to do is to track the panels to ensure they do not end up in the landfills and are instead recycled to be reused to recover materials as glass, aluminum, among others.

For this, the industry needs to have clear qualitative and quantitative criteria to be able to determine when can the panels be reused with the help of testing for electrical and safety performance. It would be an addition to the various regulations governments are bound to eventually introduce. For instance, Europe is working on bringing in mandatory eco-design and energy labeling requirements for solar PV panels and inverters to ensure sustainable technical practices.

Clyncke also argued that the PV industry needs to have integrity, a moral compass to monitor its own actions while pointing at old modules being shipped to regions that have no technical or political know-how of managing the flow and use.

This also points at the need to assist low-income countries to be self-sufficient in managing PV-electronic waste treatment facilities, so they don't end up becoming dump yards for solar waste in the future.

In a globalized world with global supply chains, it may not always be possible for manufacturers to track and bring back their panels to the manufacturing location. Hence, there is a need to think of sustainable alternatives probably in the form of establishing local recycling units, among other suggestions offered by Clyncke. At the same conference, JinkoSolar discussed various measures the vertically integrated solar module manufacturer is deploying to operate in a sustainable way. This includes setting up a 12 MW pilot production line to recycle its solar modules (see JinkoSolar PV Module Recycling Pilot Plant In Operation).

The complete presentation of Jan Clyncke along with those from other presenters are available on our YouTube channel and can be accessed here.