Thursday, 3 April 2025

Solar panel e-waste

David LIMBRICK (South-Eastern Metropolitan) (17:48): (1579) My adjournment matter this evening is for the attention of the Minister for Environment and is related to solar panel recycling. There has been a lot of talk about nuclear waste over the last couple of years, including the national embarrassment of senior members of the Labor Party, both state and federal, posting Simpsons memes in their anti-science crusade against safe and reliable nuclear power. As the legendary economist Thomas Sowell once said, there are no solutions, only trade-offs. This is certainly true in energy policy.

Solar energy is a great thing for people who want to install panels on their roof, especially in conjunction with a battery, to become energy-independent – hardly a thing for libertarians to oppose. One of the trade-offs with photovoltaic rooftop solar, however, is how to manage the waste stream. In 2019 the government banned solar panels from going to landfill, instead investing in about 120 new sheds to store e-waste. I have asked questions about this several times over the course of my time here. In October 2019 I was told that Victoria is developing a national stewardship approach for solar panels, with environment ministers expected to endorse a product stewardship program by the end of 2020. In March 2023 I was told that Breakthrough Victoria, the Victorian government’s venture capital fund, were running a competition to develop a preferred approach but we could not be told about it due to commercial in confidence. Six years ago, on 1 April 2019, Minister Jennings responded that Sustainability Victoria was leading the development of this and making good progress – a nice April Fools’ Day joke, perhaps. If you go onto their website now, there is a short section on recycling solar panels. It encourages you to go to your council website, helpfully linking to them on the website. Then, when you click through the links, many do not have information on e-waste at all and none seem to have information on solar panel recycling, and when you click through for more information on e-waste, you are directed back to Sustainability Victoria. People may be left to wonder whether the taxpayer got good value for money from the work of Sustainability Victoria in developing a product stewardship scheme.

Then yesterday the Auditor-General’s report on recycling stated that:

the department has limited or no information on some waste flows, such as e-waste and emerging material streams (for example, wind turbines and solar panels).

It has every appearance of six years of work producing no outcome. Where are the solar panels going? Is there actually a plan for dealing with this waste stream? My request to the minister is to provide an update on progress for a solar panel recycling scheme.