Issues of scale and the lack of an informed investor base are hampering efforts to grow Australia’s solar panel recycling industry, Parliament has been told.
But the ability to recover the remainder—small amounts of silicon and silver—was still in the experimental stages.
Das said that in 2025, 1.4 million solar panels should have gone to recycling across the country, yet his firm processed only 100,000.
“Where is the rest—1.3 million panels? A lot are still at solar farms. We know that, because of transportation cost, they have not moved the panels.”
And while exporting damaged, broken, or non-working panels disguised as usable second-hand goods can be prosecuted as illegal e-waste smuggling, Das said he suspected as much as 30 to 50 percent of all decommissioned panels that found their way overseas actually went to recyclers.
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Neeraj Das, founder and CEO of solar panel recycling firm ElecSome, gives evidence to the Senate. (Screen capture from Senate livestream).
Recycled Material in Infrastructure Projects
Das’s company has supplied ground glass—to be used as a substitute for sand in concrete—to the north-east link, the 6.5 kilometre tunnel project in Victoria.
It is a government procurement requirement that a major build has to use at least 20 percent of recovered product, and that was crucial to ElecSome winning the contract, Das said, because solar recycling companies need large-scale supply and demand in order to expand.
The company could supply 1,000 tonnes a month of the product, which would reduce pressure on river sand.
Investor Interest
The industry also needed investors willing to take a “leap of faith,” he said. “It is a capital-intensive market. We can’t build micro factories and compete globally. We have to build big, spend in advance, spend ahead.
“There are people in Australia and overseas who are interested in investing in this field. To date, we have invested all our money, but we cannot expand nationally, spending $50 million on our own without any support. We have full faith that it will be profitable and it will be sustainable. So we are not asking for free money. Even a loan is fine, which we can pay back in three to five years.”
Committee Chair Anne Urquhart asked Das about the impact of the failure of major solar recyclers Sircel, which entered voluntary administration and receivership in October 2025 with debts exceeding $60 million, as well as Reclaim PV, an Adelaide company that went bankrupt in 2023.
Both had issues that ElecSome doesn’t have, with equipment and feedstock, Das explained.
“[But] as soon as one company goes down, the investors’ confidence breaks and they pull [their investment],” he said. “They are not able to understand the industry, and they think something is wrong. The main reason [for failures] is that it’s capital intensive, and you are not making money up to 2029. That’s what our financial model says.”
