Roadmap for a circular photovoltaic industry

The approach to a circular economy for solar panels (PV) is described in four core points in the roadmap:

1) The photovoltaic industry must realize a sound, high-quality, circular processing of all released PV in the Netherlands. High-quality refers to meaningful reuse of complete panels according to criteria that have yet to be developed. High-quality can also refer to high-quality raw material recovery so that these raw materials can be used again for new panels or other high-quality applications.

2) The photovoltaic industry should be able to realize a stable, fraud-proof financing mechanism for PV with government support in order to arrive at a disposal fund. In this way, the avoidance of the necessary costs for future high-quality processing is prevented and it is guaranteed that the resources will be available for the collection and high-quality processing of PV.

3) Agreements are made with the installation sector about the collection of PV from roofs and solar parks as soon as they are released in the future. In this way, it is guaranteed that the discarded PV ends up in the right channel and is not disposed of as residual waste.

4) Government, knowledge institutes and Stichting OPEN together with ZRN, PV Cycle and Holland Solar will collaborate in (fundamental) research trajectories to arrive at a circular photovoltaic industry. This both on the design side (circular design) and on the raw materials side, aimed at the high-quality recovery of raw materials from discarded PV.