Sustainability · Living benchmark

A panel outlives its warranty by design. Not every maker has published where it goes next.

Every criterion in this benchmark asks what a product does while it works. This one asks what is documented about the day it stops. Across 80 active panel records, 52 carry an end-of-life reading; 31 of those point at a program a buyer could actually use, and 21 do not.

A module is sold on a 25- or 30-year performance guarantee. That is the length of the promise, not the length of the material's life: the aluminium, glass, silicon and silver in the laminate all outlast the electrical output, and the question of who takes them back is answered by a document or it is not answered at all. This report reads that document across the panel catalogue and rebuilds whenever the catalogue changes.

review.solar

End-of-life disclosure

What the exact-product material says about taking the panel back

Take-back program with a named partner, or third-party-verified recyclability16

3 brands

Take-back or recycling program published15

7 brands

Recyclability claims published, no program14

8 brands

No end-of-life documentation found in the reviewed material7

6 brands

Chart data

Series	Value	Note
Take-back program with a named partner, or third-party-verified recyclability	16	3 brands
Take-back or recycling program published	15	7 brands
Recyclability claims published, no program	14	8 brands
No end-of-life documentation found in the reviewed material	7	6 brands

How to read the states

A published program and a working recovery route are two different questions

1. 01
   Disclosure, not outcome

   Every band above measures what a manufacturer has published. None of them measures how many panels were actually recovered, and this benchmark does not currently hold recovery-volume evidence for any maker.

2. 02
   Reviewed absence

   The bottom band records that the exact-product material we read did not carry end-of-life documentation. It is a transparency finding about the reviewed sources, not a finding that no program exists.

3. 03
   Market boundary

   A take-back scheme is usually jurisdictional. A European WEEE registration or a United States partner program does not establish an Australian route, and the individual scorecard records which market the evidence covers.

4. 04
   Product maturity

   Pre-commercial and newly announced products sit in the catalogue alongside volume hardware. A product not yet shipping in volume has had no occasion to publish a take-back route, and the absence should be read with that in mind.

5. 05
   Score boundary

   This report describes evidence. It moves a score only when the supported criterion value itself changes.

The four bands, and who sits in each

The top band is the only one where something outside the manufacturer's own marketing corroborates the route: a named recycler, or a third-party-verified environmental product declaration carrying explicit end-of-life rates. 31 of 52 assessed panels reach at least a published program. The remaining 21 either assert recyclability without identifying a route, or do not address the question in the material we read.

Where the reviewed material is silent

These 7 records carry no end-of-life documentation in the exact-product sources read for them. Several are pre-commercial, newly announced, or built on cell architectures that have not yet reached volume production, and for those the absence describes the stage the product is at rather than a position the manufacturer has taken.

• AIKO G4 Infinite Ultra
• Mission Solar MSE PERC 72
• SunDrive Copper HJT
• Tandem PV Tandem module
• TCL Solar 210R 48P
• TCL Solar 210R 66P
• Tesla TSP 420

Each link opens the complete scorecard and the criterion-level source trail behind it. A manufacturer holding a document we did not find can submit it through the public evidence queue or the correction route, and the band moves when the document lands.

The paired question: what the panel cost to make

End-of-life sits in the same pillar as embodied carbon, and the two are read together: a panel that is cheap to make and impossible to recover is a different proposition from one that is expensive to make and fully documented at both ends. 44 active panels carry a carbon-footprint reading. 21 hold a verified environmental product declaration, 14 publish nothing, and the balance state a corporate figure without a product declaration behind it.

The larger gap: the criterion stops at the panel

This pillar currently applies to panels only. 76 active home batteries and 73 active inverters carry no end-of-life or recycling criterion at all. That is not a poor result, it is an unasked question. That is the more consequential omission of the two: a lithium battery reaches end of life sooner than a module, and its recovery economics turn on cells and metals that the module recycling debate does not touch. Extending the pillar to storage and power electronics is the next piece of work this report argues for, and it is recorded as an open scope question rather than presented as a finding.

What changes this report

The counts, bands and lists above are generated from the current dataset. A manufacturer publishing a take-back route, a verified declaration arriving, or a new product entering the catalogue changes this report on the next benchmark build, without the article being rewritten by hand.

Sources and methodliving dataset

• Current panel catalogue and its criterion-level source links. Every band above resolves to exact-product material recorded on the individual scorecard.
• Published methodology, including the evidence-state rules that separate a sourced value from a reviewed absence and from an unresolved question.
• Public evidence requests for questions that remain open, including the storage and inverter scope gap described above.