It’s a sunny autumn morning and journalists, TV camera crews and influencers have gathered at Urbnsurf in Sydney Olympic Park – New South Wales’ only indoor surf park – to see the world’s first surfboards made from decommissioned wind-turbine blades.
At a glance, these are indistinguishable from your typical, run-of-the-mill surfboards, and there are pro surfers here taking them for a spin as they would any other board. But flip them over and you’ll find a small paragraph of text printed above the fins, detailing the amount of renewable energy the wind turbine once generated (14,773 megawatts per hour), the CO₂ emissions it offset (19,056 tonnes), and the coordinates of its former location (Victoria’s Waubra Wind Farm.)
The surfboards were designed by pro surfer Josh Kerr, founder of Draft Surf, in collaboration with international renewable infrastructure conglomerate Acciona. “Basically, we got a three-metre by two-metre-wide section of a turbine blade dropped off at the factory in one whole piece. It was probably a nice 250kg,” Josh says. “The turbine itself is just pure hard fibreglass and balsa wood, so if you tried to make a board out of that, it would sink to the bottom of the ocean.”
Josh and his team repurposed the turbine for the surfboard’s fins and strengthening rods. They also collected the particulate (a powder-like byproduct from milling the blades) and added it to the board’s resin. “Weightwise, I’d say 30 to 40 per cent of the weight of the board is turbine,” Josh says.
These turbine-made surfboards are prototypes, as Josh’s factory isn’t able to produce them at a commercial scale. But they perform as well as any other board. “I was really stoked about that,” Josh says.
“They came out pretty light, because we utilised less glass, but they were really strong and had a really good flex pattern to them with the rods we inserted, and also [due to] the powder we put into the resin.”
The surfboards were made as part of Acciona’s Turbine Made initiative, which is exploring pathways to repurpose decommissioned turbine blades in Australia. As the country’s renewables products age, we can expect to see similar projects like this in the future.
In 2023 the Clean Energy Council published a report explaining that a quarter of Australia’s wind farms were more than 15 years old. Given that these types of facilities have a life span of 20–30 years, it means about 600 wind turbines are approaching retirement.
In Australia, between 85–94 per cent of a wind turbine’s mass is recyclable, because it’s made from easily recoverable materials such as steel, aluminium, copper and cast iron. The turbine’s blades, however, are another matter entirely. These are made from composite materials, typically fibreglass embedded in cross-linked polymer resins, which are considerably more difficult to separate and recycle.
Usually, ‘recycled’ wind turbine blades are shredded or ground down into powder and used as an additive in construction materials. But there’s not much of a market demand for this product, so most turbine blades just end up in landfill. These decommissioned Australian wind farms will produce an estimated 15,000t of blade composite waste by 2034, and as much as 30,000t by 2050.
Ageing wind turbines aren’t the only waste crisis looming within Australia’s renewables sector. The federal Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW) reports lithium-ion battery waste is increasing 20 per cent each year, but Australia’s lithium-ion battery recycling capability is still in its infancy.
Currently, recycling a lithium-ion battery in Australia means shredding it locally and then shipping it overseas for processing. And this is the exception, rather than the rule: according to CSIRO, just 10 per cent of Australia’s lithium-ion battery waste was recycled in 2021, compared to 99 per cent of lead acid battery waste.
Building Australia’s lithium-ion battery recycling capability will ultimately be a race against the clock, because this waste is increasing at an aggressive rate. CSIRO estimates Australia currently produces 3300t of lithium-ion battery waste each year, but this number is expected to reach 136,000t by 2036. That figure, however, pales in comparison to the eye-watering volumes of waste generated by photovoltaic (PV) solar panels.
Solar panel waste
More than 4 million homes and small businesses across Australia generate electricity using rooftop solar panels – one of the highest rates of rooftop solar panel installations per capita in the world. But as little as 10 per cent of these panels are recycled, making solar panels the fastest-growing e-waste stream in Australia. Dr Rong Deng, from the UNSW School of Photovoltaic and Renewable Energy Engineering, says Australians currently dispose of two million PV solar panels each year.
“If you put it into weight, it’s about 50,000t per year, maximum,” she says. “Millions of panels sounds horrible, but if you put the weight into perspective with other types of waste, the solar panel waste is less than 0.5 per cent of the coal ash waste we generate every year as a country.”
Unlike coal ash, however, Australia’s solar panel waste is increasing exponentially. “The volume [of solar panel waste] will double every 4–5 years from now to 2040,” Rong says.
A report from the Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics predicts the cumulative volume of end-of-life solar panels in Australia will hit 1 million tonnes by 2035. But Rong isn’t pessimistic. “Recycling [solar panels] is not a problem. We just need some time to set up our capability,” she says.
“We say solar panels are hard to recycle because our technology is not really there. Because it’s early-stage, everything is hard. Like every technology, we can’t go straight to the best technology from day one; we have generation-one technology in the market.”
As much as 99.97 per cent of Australia’s PV solar panels have been installed since 2010, so virtually all 2 million panels discarded in Australia each year are less than 15 years old, despite having an operational life of 25–30 years. Many of these discarded panels are still perfectly functional; people dispose of them because they want to upgrade to a new system, or because one part of a panel has malfunctioned, so they replace it with a brand-new panel instead of repairing it. Based on this current trajectory, the Clean Energy Council predicts Australia will have discarded 34.6GW of fully serviceable solar panels by 2045. That’s enough to power about 26 million homes.
This waste problem isn’t unique to Australia. The International Renewable Energy Agency estimates PV waste will reach 1.7–8 million tonnes in 2030, and as much as 60–78 million tonnes by 2050, making solar panels one of the fastest-growing electronic waste (e-waste) streams globally. And just like microwaves, laptops, smartphones, DVD players and other types of e-waste, solar panels contain valuable metals – in this case, copper, silver and aluminium – that are mined from the earth and might one day be in short supply.
The good news is that upwards of 95 per cent of a solar panel can be recycled, and recovering these critical minerals is actually quite lucrative. In fact, Rong and her research team estimate the total material value extracted from end-of-life solar panels will surpass $1 billion by 2035.
“I read a lot of media that treat solar panel [waste] as a crisis, but I would say it’s not a problem – it’s a huge opportunity for us,” Rong says. “We can generate more value. We can create more jobs. We can improve our circular economy.”
Shredding solar panels into smaller pieces is the most common recycling method in Australia, although it’s not ideal because critical minerals aren’t recovered and the end material is a ‘downcycled’ product, meaning it has a lower value than its original form. The shredded solar panels are often used as additives to construction materials such as concrete or bricks.
“Without regulatory pressure, people are just doing the simplest and cheapest stuff,” Rong says. “All the panels will go to Africa, or go to landfill, or [recyclers] break it down from big pieces into small pieces.”
The DCCEEW national product stewardship scheme for end-of-life solar panels has been in development for a number of years and has been delayed for various reasons. Without an overarching national policy, legislation about solar panel waste disposal (and e-waste more generally) varies between states and territories.
Victoria is the only state that has outright banned solar panels from entering landfill, although South Australia and the Australian Capital Territory both have restrictions on e-waste disposal. In NSW, solar panels must be assessed, typically by a licensed electrician, before being sent to landfill. Western Australia is in the early stages of rolling out its Waste Avoidance and Resource Recovery (e-waste) Regulations 2024, which will ultimately see e-waste, including solar panels, banned from landfill in future phases. It’s still legal to dispose of solar panels in landfill in Queensland, Tasmania and the Northern Territory.
Recycling a solar panel has historically been more expensive for a consumer than sending it to landfill or shipping it overseas to second-hand reuse markets. In states without strict e-waste disposal legislation, this price difference has been a deterrent to recycling, but this is likely to change as Australia’s recycling infrastructure improves, scales up, and eventually begins generating resources. In metropolitan cities, the recycling price is already competitive with landfill disposal.
Commercial opportunity
Tackling the solar panel waste crisis will be difficult in a voluntary market, but there are already several solar panel recycling facilities operating across Australia, including PV Industries, Sircel, and Pan Pacific Recycling.
James Petesic co-founded the Sydney-based PV Industries in 2018 and has seen first-hand the exponential increase of solar panel waste. “Every year is bigger than the last,” he says. “We’ve just upgraded our machinery, so we have the capacity to be processing a panel every minute.” James says that number is “a really conservative figure” because PV Industries isn’t operating at capacity.
“You might get a truckload one day, and that’ll be the bulk of [solar panels] for that week,” he says. “So, even though we do process thousands of panels a year, the capacity of our line is much more than that – it’s just a matter of trying to get our hands on as much feedstock as we possibly can so that we’re operating close to capacity.”
But that’s likely to change as states and territories begin clamping down on e-waste landfill bans, which will make it harder for people to dispose of their panels. “We’re in a great spot in that sense, because we’re providing a solution that was otherwise not there,” James says.
PV Industries now operates in two locations – Sydney and Melbourne – and has received nearly $7 million in government funding to date. Unfortunately, misconceptions persist, including the claim that solar panels are impossible to recycle, which James hears a lot.
“I do get quite disappointed when I hear people say that solar panels can’t be recycled. It’s not the case – they absolutely can be,” he says. “They’re very hard to recycle, don’t get me wrong. It’s not something flippant that we can just do willy-nilly. It’s extremely difficult to recycle them, and that’s why we’ve invented machinery to do so.”
PV Industries uses original patented technology to remove a solar panel’s glass and aluminium frame, which accounts for about 85–90 per cent of the solar panel’s weight. To recover the panel’s critical metals, the solar panels are shredded into a powder-like substance. “That powder goes into a chemical process to extract 99 per cent pure silver and copper,” James says.
This last step, however, is still in development. Silver might make up just 0.1 per cent of a PV solar panel’s weight, but it poses the biggest challenge to recyclers. “There’s nobody in the world that’s currently extracting silver from solar panels at a commercial scale,” James says. “So that step is something that not just we are struggling with. The entire world is still trying to figure out the best way to recover those metals.”
James estimates that within the next two years it will be cheaper to recycle a solar panel than dispose of it in landfill. Until then, he encourages people to support the industry by recycling their solar panels instead of choosing the cheapest option, which is landfill disposal. “If we don’t support the industry in its infancy, it won’t be there when we really need it,” he says.
“When this tidal wave of solar panels that people are claiming [is coming] does hit – which inevitably it will – we need to make sure we have businesses that are established, running and robust so that those panels are able to be recycled. Because it seems like it’s at a crawl at the moment, but it will turn into a sprint very quickly.”