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Victorian solar panel recycler Elecsome has upgraded its facility in the state’s east after acquiring and installing a state-of-the-art dust extraction unit. Elecsome, billing itself as Australia’s first solar panel “upcycling” plant, announced on its LinkedIn account on Tuesday that it had acquired the new dust extraction unit from Airtight Solutions, a New South Wales supplier of air pollution control systems. The new dust extraction unit is designed to create a safer and cleaner work environment while also improving the efficiency of materials recovery. Elecsome’s upcycling process is able to extract many of the materials used in solar panels for further reuse, including silicon wafers for reuse as solar PV- or battery-grade silicon, silver and copper for reuse as raw materials, and aluminium for use as cans and other solar panel frames. Most importantly for Elecsome’s process, however, is the use of silica from the solar panels to create SolarCrete, the company’s patented aggregate mix that can be used as an alternative to sand as a concrete pre-mix. The upgrade to Elecsome’s plant comes at a time of uncertainty in Australia’s solar recycling efforts, following so soon after the news that Sircel, Australia’s largest established e-waste recycler, had entered voluntary administration less than six weeks after announcing a $10 million private capital raise and its plans to go public in 2026. Sircel’s failure was just the latest in a line of failed attempts across the country to kickstart solar recycling, which also includes the 2023 bankruptcy of Adelaide based company Reclaim PV. Ironically, according to Neeraj Das, the managing director of Elecsome, who spoke to Renew Economy earlier this month, one of the major issues is lack of easy access to enough solar panels for recycling – despite claims by the Smart Energy Council estimating 4 million solar panels head to waste each year. “What is mainly affecting a lot of companies is the high upfront capital investment,” said Das. “You’re burning a lot of cash, but initially the number of panels coming in is not high enough to justify that capital investment and labour cost, or match the numbers of panels estimated to be available.” The good news for Elecsome, according to Das, is that they have already secured a steady flow of panels from major solar farms.
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