Alberta is moving to keep solar panels out of its landfills, with the provincial government announcing a new recycling system designed to protect landfill capacity while recovering valuable materials and creating a new recycling industry.
Starting October 1, Alberta will become the first province in Canada to operate a dedicated solar panel recycling program. From the same date, solar panels will no longer be permitted to be disposed of in landfills.
The province currently has the second-largest installed solar capacity in Canada. As the sector continues to expand, the volume of panels reaching the end of their useful life is expected to grow significantly. By 2045, more than 95 per cent of the solar panels currently installed across Alberta are expected to have reached the end of their lifespan, potentially generating up to 72,700 tonnes of material.
Those panels contain a range of valuable resources, including glass, aluminum, silicon, silver, copper and other metals. Rather than sending these materials to landfill, Alberta’s new system is intended to recover them and return them to productive use in new products.
The government says the program will also encourage investment in collection and processing infrastructure and help establish a new solar panel recycling industry within the province.
To finance the system, an environmental fee of $14 will be applied to every new solar panel supplied in Alberta beginning October 1. For a typical residential installation consisting of 20 panels, the proposed environmental fee would amount to $280.
The funds generated by the fee will be used to ensure that resources are available to collect, transport and recycle panels once they reach the end of their useful lives. The charge will apply only to new panels supplied after the program comes into effect.
Most solar panels are designed to have an expected lifespan of approximately 25 years. As the number of panels requiring end-of-life management increases, the province and the Alberta Recycling Management Authority will work with industry to expand reuse and recycling capacity across Alberta.
The initiative is intended to ensure that the growing volume of solar equipment does not simply become a future waste-management burden, while allowing the materials contained in the panels to remain part of the resource and manufacturing cycle.
