The proper disposal of photovoltaic modules has become an emerging environmental and social issue as modules installed around the 2000s have started entering their end-of-life stage. The decommissioning volume will keep increasing, reaching the gigawatt scale, or millions of tons, by 2030. End-of-life silicon photovoltaic modules contain various valuable materials, such as high-purity silicon and silver. Recycling silicon and silver from the end-of-life modules can significantly improve the recycling revenue. We developed an environmentally sustainable chemical process for simultaneously recovering high-purity silver and silicon from waste solar cells in a fast, efficient, and environmentally friendly way. Reverse electroplating with a full-area contact can successfully recover 99.9% purity metallic silver with a 95% yield within a few minutes. The electrolyte can be reused. The applied voltage and current densities play an important role in achieving a high recycling yield. Subsequent alkaline etching can recover 4N purity silicon with a 99% yield. The chemical process minimises chemical consumption and waste disposal, resulting in the avoidance of 1.60 kg CO₂-eq Climate Change impact per kg cell recycled. Even though further chemical etching can remove impurities from the silicon surface to recover up to 5N silicon, the use of strong acids involves serious environmental disadvantages, the overall impacts of which are much higher than those of recovering 4N silicon using a simplified chemical process.

Determining the lifetime of solar photovoltaic modules is integral to planning future installations and ensuring effective end-of-life management. The lifetime of photovoltaic modules is most commonly considered to be 25 years based on performance guarantees of 80% power output after 25 years of operation; however, influences including climatic conditions, social behaviour, fiscal policy, and technological improvements have the potential to prompt early replacement. Therefore, this work aims to estimate the operating lifetime of photovoltaic panels more accurately in Australia by considering a variety of technical, economic, and social reasons for decommissioning. Based on a range of sources including government organisations, other policymakers, regulators and advisors, energy suppliers, researchers, recyclers, and manufacturers, three lifetime models—power decrease, damage and technical failures, and economic motivation—were developed and then weighted in three scenarios to form overall views of panel lifetime in Australia. In addition, it was concluded that the module lifetime will vary considerably between countries due to differences in market factors. Therefore, these results specifically address Australia as most of the input data were sourced from Australian industry reports and Australian photovoltaic systems and interpreted within the context of the Australian photovoltaic market. However, the methodology of estimating lifetime based on both technical and non-technical factors can be applied to other scenarios by using country-specific data. With the popularity of photovoltaic technology beginning in the early 2010s and given the practical lifetimes of 15–20 years found in this work, Australia will need to act swiftly within the next three years to responsibly manage the looming solar panel waste.