Battery Boom, EVs & Energy Costs: Where Australia Is Heading - EP57

So you've got the challenge then therefore to also bring the panels in. It's a nice solar panel. It got off my roof. It did 10 years.

Supposed to last 25. I'll send it to Africa and some poor people can still get cheap power for the next 15 years. Why smash it up? It's a topic close to my heart, that one, Marcus.

So I saw it in your eyes. You start to scrub a bit of data. Presented by your energy answers. Welcome to the YEA podcast.

I'm here with James Petisic from PV Industries. And James plays a very, very important part in this industry because his company recycled solar panels. And guess what? With a new battery rebate, a lot of panels coming off roofs because they're not efficient enough.

So, James, welcome to the YEA podcast. Thank you, Marcus. Thanks for having me. Now we've met what, about eight years ago or so at LG years ago when I was running that, and you were looking for busted panels and all that.

So you've been doing it for a while. Yeah, I started the business in 2018. And I think I saw you on a 730 report first up in 2019, and then I uh got onto the laptop and sent you an email back in your with your LG hat on. And I rang back, yes.

So the thing is that I mean, you're not that old. So you left school at one stage. I mean, not many kids walk out with the HSE or whatever and go, oh, I go into solar panel recycling. How did all that happen?

Yeah, it's funny when you look back at my career, every single step, or even from school to obviously uni, and then out of uni, I uh well, I studied agricultural economics and majored in commercial law, and I wanted to do tax advisory and tax consulting. Got an opportunity to sell software or go into a sales career, so I went in to work for Oracle selling finance systems and planning and budgeting tools. That was my first job out of uni, which had obviously no correlation to economics or agricultural economics or commercial law.

And uh I was responsible for selling into local councils. I had an idea around an e-waste collection app. I spoke to a guy up in Queensland from a council and told him about this idea. He turned around to me and said, Look, you know what, it's a good idea, but to be honest, it's been done.

And if you want to get into this space, uh have a look at solar panels. There's a massive issue, and no one's doing anything about it. I was like, okay, so three, four months of research later, Excel models and all sorts of little formulas in in spreadsheets, uh, started the business, and seven, seven, eight years later, here we are. Right, right, right.

But I would say to you in general that when it comes to Australia, I mean, we are supposed to be the clean and clean clean industry because panels get generated all around the country, bring them back to a central area, there is a cost involved. So in the early years especially, a lot of panels just ended up in landfill, or even were just exported out again into third world countries. Not our problem anymore. So tell me kind of the journey of how the whole recycling industry started, um, how it's growing, what are the challenges?

So the way I sort of like to frame it is when you think of a plasma TV, back in the day they were, you know, 20, 30 grand new and it was only the rich and famous that had a nice plasma TV. And now you can go down, well, it's Black Friday sales around this time of the year, so you can go grab a TV for $800 from Audi or $600 from Audi. So when we first started the business, solar panels were probably around the $30 per panel to recycle mark, somewhere there. And now we've reduced to closer to ten.

Meaning you got paid $30 to take the panel or the value of the panel was still. So we charge we charge customers $30 per panel to recycle. And now uh depends on obviously how many panels and the type of customer, but it's around the ten dollars per panel mark or even a bit less. So But hang on, I'm a solar installer and I've just done a recall on whatever panel 55, and I got 2,000 sitting there.

Yeah. That's a hell of a lot of aluminium. You should be paying me. Yeah, it's uh it's a good theory.

Umfortunately, solar panels A are a brand new waste stream, and two, the the way they are constructed, particularly with the glass. Uh we've had to produce and develop our own machinery. So there was we went at the time we went and bought a solar panel D framer from a company in Italy. It arrived two years late and broken.

Once we fixed it, we realized it was actually only capable of processing maybe 15 or 20 percent of the panels we were receiving. So we had to Why because panels have different frame heights and everything and this thing was and heights and all the height all the different dimensions of a panel. And the and the Italian word goes this solar panel fits and everything else, bad luck. Correct.

Gee. So yeah, it was one of those things where we had to back in 2018, you can imagine there weren't too many off-the-shelf solar panel recycling machines that you could purchase. And even today there is a a handful, but we've spent a lot of time and uh money doing RD, developing our own technology. So we've invented our own machines to to de-frame and to de-glass.

Uh not as simple as just uh taking a solar panel to a scrap metal provider and getting paid for the aluminium, because the aluminium only represents maybe 10% of the panel by weight. So it's not uh it's it's not viable just to run the business on recovering aluminium. There are so many other components of the panel that we need to sort out and look after. To be able to sell some of those products, like the glass, we need to extract it cleanly.

And to extract it cleanly, you have to have some really precise technology that can achieve that. Right, right. Because I mean there are really in your business a couple of streams. Firstly, you've got to secure that the panels come in regularly.

Then you obviously got to have the workforce because if they come sporadic, you can't employ people casual, come in on Monday, I'm gonna need you for three hours. So you need to come to the stream regularly. But then you also need to whatever comes out of it to have a channel to a sell them to or at least dispose it to, depending on what the cost factors are. So what are those two challenges and streams?

You know, where do where do recycled solar panel bits go afterwards? So we sell our recovered materials to either scrap metal providers, if it's metal, and in the case of glass, we have various different outlets for the glass, whether it be construction companies or new manufacturing companies. So manufactured stone benchtops is a good example where we've been able to sell multiple tons of our glass to go into uh manufactured stone benchtops, and they have they don't have that uh issue with the uh silicosis.

Yeah. No. So we've had the glass. So that was that pr issue gave birth to a new industry in manufacturing industry in Australia where there was a few different companies that popped up manufacturing their own uh crystalline silica-free bench tops.

Right. So the type of silica that exists uh in the solar glass is a different it it doesn't contain the silica that has been banned, essentially. And the silica that was banned came from China. So a lot of the manufactured stone bench tops out of China were banned.

Because they contained uh crystalline silica. Right. Just like that um sand that they're just giving us lately that has a few little surprises in it. I saw that.

And they only found that by they were testing their machine would just check the sand and then suddenly found that by default. By mistake kind of thing. Oh gee. Maybe they should do that sometimes with a bit of food that we eat, you know, just kind of test it through and see what the residues they left on the bottom.

Microplastics, maybe? Oh god. I mean the challenges we have nowadays, some people in the fifties wouldn't even think of the headaches we get. All right, so you get the glass into bench tops.

You said road base or something like that? So we've uh established some partnerships with the likes of John Holland and some of their downstream providers, where we've put just here in Western Sydney on the M7M12 interchange, the new highway that's connecting up the Western Sydney airport, we've put some glass into the road. So not so much the road base, but into the into the asphalt. And that uh is a what is a national first.

So John Holland are now up for uh an award. I think if not this week, it would might be next week. Some awards happening for sustainability sustainable products. And so that road that contains uh solar glass, it's not solar panels, it's just the glass.

Because the rest of the solar panel is typically metal and they that contains high value. So we want to keep that out of the glass. It's just the glass we want to make sure finds a home because 75 to 80% of a solar panel is glass by weight. So when you think of 2,000 panels, each one weighs 20, 25 kilos, that's a lot of glass.

And we need to make sure we have a home for that glass. And the likes of bench tops are great because they are a high value but a lower volume, whereas construction applications like a road, for instance, is a super high volume but a lower value. And we need to make sure we have homes for the glass. Not we as not just PV industries, but as an industry, we have a home for the glass because that is the biggest problem product that we would produce through the recycling.

But hang on, glass. I mean, can't we just use that again to make glass bottles out of it? I mean, glass is recyclable, this is clear glass. Should be easy.

Should be. Unfortunately, it's not that easy. Uh, the solar glass itself has an additive to it to make it more uh transmissible of with of light. So you would think say, for example, a windshield.

A windshield has iron in it to help reflect light so it's not as glary when you're driving your car. You want to reflect light off the windshield. In a solar panel, you want it to be the opposite. You want to let as much light as possible through the glass so that it hits the silicon cells and produces more electricity.

So there's an additive in the glass which, when put back into glass manufacturing for, say, windshields or glass bottles or what they call float glass, the way glass is typically manufactured, uh the the additive in the glass chews away or um has a negative impact at some of the machinery or the process or the processing of new glass and hence solar or not solar glass. Well, there is no solar glass manufacturing in Australia for a start. And secondly, for glass manufacturers, they don't want to deal with that additive because it has a negative impact on their processing.

Right. But no, seriously, I think we we are kind of like a bit of a patsy of when we do our negotiations, you know, free the free market as they discover more and more does not really exist. It's a um Trojan horse to kill your own industry to then charge you more when you're stuffed and you've got none left. I mean, that's just uh another little takes a while to get there, but yeah.

At a high level, that's probably a lot of. Well, we had somebody here recently who just talked about the whole issue about Australia and a national security, and the national security element is never really taken into consideration when we make those decisions as to do we support um this company purchasing that. I mean, the port of Darwin is a is a great example. I mean that one fell through the crack, no idea.

But uh, you know, the left hand of the bureaucracy doesn't always know what the right hand is doing. So you've got the challenge then, therefore, to also bring the panels in because I mean it's a nice solar panel, it got off my roof, it did 10 years, supposed to last 25. I'll send it to Africa and some poor people can still get cheap power for the next 15 years. Why smash it up?

It's a topic close to my heart, that one, Marcus. So I saw it in your eyes. You still have to throw a bit of a dart at me. Yeah.

First of all, it's illegal, right? So there's a thing called the Basel Convention that Australia is a party to, which limits the offshore export of waste. No, no, no. That panel still works.

At least seven out of the ten still work. I don't know which other three that are broken, but I'm sure that people are happy to get at least seven that work. So in order for a panel to uh be considered working and not so let's say this, in order for the panel not to be considered waste when it leaves the shores, it needs to be adequately tested and adequately packaged. And by an adequate test, we don't mean a visual inspection or putting a multimeter into the into the panel in the sunlight.

It needs a proper test. Uh luminescence or something in front of the room. Yeah, but that will make the panel too expensive. Exactly.

It's too expensive to test it adequately because the value in that panel is not high enough. So in order for that that market to be active, we can't test it adequately. We can't test the panel adequately to be satisfying government regulations that uh it should it is fit for reuse. So we don't know if the panel's fit for reuse when it leaves Australia.

We we can think it is, but uh let's just assume it is for now, right? And we're we're sending it off. That panel may or may not be fit for for use, but assume it is, it's off. We've now lost the materials in that panel.

So the aluminium, the silver, the copper, the silicon, the glass, everything that makes up a panel is now sitting somewhere in Pakistan, India, uh possibly Africa, Nigeria, somewhere like that, right? So we've now lost uh critical minerals. So silicon is a critical mineral, it's on been on the government's critical minerals list for for many, many years. Let's just say four years.

That's all of a sudden gone. Put that aside, let's uh look at another issue. So, what about brand new panels that are coming from China? We know the cost of panels have been coming down pretty aggressively over the last couple of years.

There's been a supply glut ever since COVID, I believe, when um there was a sub a supply glut that's continued. The manufacturing of panels is keeping on ramping up, and there's been too many panels in the market, the price per watt has come down substantially. It's a bit of a price war out there, so far as I'm I've seen or heard when speaking to solar manufacturers. So there is an opportunity for panels that maybe aren't on the CEC list in Australia that have dropped off or weren't on in the first place, the manufacturer needs to get rid of them.

We they are 450, 500 watts. Would it not make more sense to take brand new panels that aren't fit for use in a country like Australia and give those or sell those at a cheaper price to those markets where instead of getting a secondhand questionable panel that's might maybe 190, call it 220, we'll give it the benefit of the doubt. Stuff it. We'll call it 250, right?

250. 250. Let's say it's a 250 water, and we know those panels have some of those panels have known back sheet issues. Oh, they'll still get two or three years out of them.

That's fine, but why why couldn't they get 15 years of a new panel that's 450, 500 that we know works, doesn't have a backsheet issue, and that all of those materials, when it when that panel does die in two years' time, it's just going to sit somewhere in a field in a developing country, somewhere around the world, and all that aluminium, silver, copper is just sit sitting. Rotting away. Right. What he's really saying, I mean, I'm I'm toying with him a little bit.

I'm sorry, James. That's all right. I can give you a statistic if you like. No, no, but I get that in a minute.

But the truth is really, um, if the panels come off, a lot of them, the big numbers that are coming off from Australia now are 175 watt, 220, 250s, and from a technology point of view, they're nearly like a 1950s car from a safety point of view. A lot of them haven't got the fireproofing and the backing sheet, etc. So we are sending headaches, really, or of very old technology overseas. But the biggest thing is that the economical incentive of that have literally died now because the cost of transport, then take out the ones that don't work, then take the fact that it's all technology when actually the new panels have now turned into less than $100 per panel when they started off at $1,500 per panel.

So that's how much solar panels have come down. So I kind of would actually agree to you that if I have an African village and I have a little hut, I possibly want the most highest efficient panel on that because I've got limited roof space and what looked like a good social project a couple of years ago, I think the economics are really falling out of it. Yeah, for sure. But now you're saying it's actually not even allowed to export it, is it?

No, as of the 1st of January, it was always a bit of a grey area. Let's say that. The Basel Convention always had uh question marks around whether it was permissible. Now, as of the 1st of January this year, there were some additional amendments made to that convention where it's now quite clear that it's illegal to export waste from Australia.

Well, from a di from the countries that are signed up to the convention to developing countries. But I mean if those panels, let's say I know a bloke who was helping uh churches in East Timor's and hospitals and put solar systems on there, and he did sometimes use secondhand panels, but relatively new ones, would he now be pro having problems bringing them from Australia across to East Timor or not? Look, the policing side of it, I'm not a part. I mean, if you stick them at the back of a container with chairs and hospital gear and all that stuff that you accumulated as part of a finance and support drive.

For sure. Um I'd say you'd probably still get away with it. Absolutely. There's nothing stopping the But those panels they already know where they're going, they're installing them.

It's a full contained project. I think that's rather m different to the ones that I hear about, which is you go to some African markets, and uh there are the handbags and there's the food, and then there's stacks and stacks of solar panels. Yeah, and it sounds silly, but we I've seen videos firsthand of that's exactly what it is. There's these m markets, rows of rows of m towers of solar panels that are sitting there that have come from not just Australia, but you know, Europe and America.

I'm sure there's wherever there is panels being decommissioned, there's an export market. So But it's kind of filling up. It's yeah, it's saturated. I well, I won't say it is completely saturated, but it's it's getting there.

I had a call yesterday from a guy, an installer in regional Queensland, and he said to me, I've got 300 panels, 400 panels. We used to send them offshore. Unfortunately, they're not taking them anymore. That's we've sent as many as we can, they're full.

Now we have to find a recycler for them. And I'm like, Well, unfortunately, what's his first name, Chris? No, I don't remember his first name. No, because I sent the guy to you.

I had somebody a couple of days complain to me, Oh, I used to flick them. Off to Africa. I'm not allowed to do it anymore. What am I gonna do with the panels now?

And I actually gave him your phone number. So but maybe that was the guy. But anyway, I'll keep an ear out if uh I do speak to a Chris and I'll tell him Marcus sent him. Um but no, I I don't I one, I don't believe it was Chris.

Uh but secondly, it's just proof that these things are start these avenues are starting to dry up just because we've sent so many panels, not just again, not just Australia, but globally we've sent so many panels to these developing nations, they're sort of drowning in panels now. We're gonna have to think of the more a more sustainable way of dealing with the waste. But uh I also noticed now some councils start to put when you put the council clean up, you know, and they say, Oh, you're not allowed to put tires in it and concrete blocks and trees that's so big that only the hulk can carry them.

But now I've also noticed solar panels are getting added to it. Is the is are councils playing a way a a role to bring panels back into the recycling stream? They are playing a role by providing space for a drop-off point, for instance. Right.

If those councils don't have uh a drop-off point, maybe that's why they're not accepting them. Depends on the state. Some states ban e-waste from going to landfill, so that it it is already illegal to throw it into the tip. But solar panels aren't like it's similar to the tree example, right?

You can't have a I think it's a piece over a meter long or something like that. Something that two people can't carry. Correct. And a solar panel is typically 1.

6 to 2.2, maybe. So it really needs two people to maneuver, and they don't want to put those panels into a garbage truck because they just people just turn up, launch it into back of a garbage truck, it gets crushed and taken away. As soon as that happens, you can't recycle it, it's all mangled and it's done.

So we need to keep them I won't say intact, we need to keep them relatively intact in in terms of the shape. The glass can be smashed, that's not an issue. It's just making sure that panel isn't, you know, folded over on itself and being gone. Just glass smashed, what happens is it's not becomes like a jagged thing that can cut you, but it's like those car windscreen that it becomes into small little pieces, but because it's uh stuck to the um a laminate, it doesn't kind of fall out.

So when it's cracked and gets smashed, he can still recycle it, but and it's it's not necessarily a danger for people to carry it and all that. So it's a temporary not like a glass bottle which uh you know can you can cut yourself badly on, etc. Just to make that clear. You still should wear gloves playing with them and all that.

But have you uh seen a difference in the supply side of things that more are coming through? Definitely. Uh did you in the past walk around with begging balls, says I need solar panels? I mean, how has it gone and how is it felt the fact that you charge for them?

It's a bit to unpack there. Let's start from the top. So what do we do at the beginning? I didn't know about begging balls at the time, but I I should have I should have looked into that.

My begging ball was a PowerPoint presentation and uh presenting to anyone that will listen to tell them it was educating the market to say, hey, this is the issue that's coming up. Sure, the issue at the moment isn't super critical because the panels that are coming off aren't we're not swimming in them, but give it another three, six, ten years, we will be swimming in panels. And I think the f one of the first presentations I ever did to the installer audience at a distributor training day, I think it was out in the blue mountains.

I had one installer put their hand up and say, I just sell my panels on Gumtree. And this was like probably 2019. And I said to him, That's fine, like good on you. I'm I'm glad you're able to sell them.

But there will be a time where you won't there will be so many panels coming off roofs that you will not be able to sell as many as you're decommissioning. So you might be doing one every two, one decommissioning job every two weeks now, back in 2019. In 2026, you'll be doing it every day. And at that point, are are we what going to be selling them on gum tree?

And there's gonna be people walking around George Street buying a solar panel from the guy that just brought it from home? Like, no. I mean, actually, there's a high level of illegality in it because the Clean Energy Council always insists that the panels that getting onto roofs right now are the latest technology with the best fireproofing, latest testing, high efficiency. And so they drop kind of off every couple of years from the list.

And you should not really connect into the electric network any panels that is not on the approved list at the moment, which in some way adds quite a lot of waste because some panels could still be perfectly well. So then you're really only having the farm uh water pumping market, you've got maybe the off-grid market for the secondhand panels, but nowadays panels are so cheap, it's like saying I'm buying a 15-year-old car for my new transport business, all my all my uh uh trucks will be 15 years old because I can you know pick them up a bit cheaper.

But the reliability factor in itself would possibly mean that long term you might regret that decision. You paid a bit less initially, but new trucks are so cheap now. And you've got the STCs, the the rebates are. That's right.

There's still a rebate for the existing panels on top of it, which nearly pays for the panel. So, really, recycling is literally the only corner where a lot of panels now economically can go. Yeah, it's the only sustainable way that we can make sure those metals stay in circulation for longer, because a metal can be reused an infinite number of times, like aluminum and copper, or you can continually boil it down and create a new copper cable or aluminium frame. So we don't want to lose things like silver.

I'll throw the statistic at you now. So if we don't start recovering silver from let's just say solar panels, but all e-waste, but say solar panels, by 2050, the solar panel manufacturing sector will be consuming 90% of the world's silver supply. So just because we're growing that much, is it? Correct.

The amount of potential. But maybe they change the technology and can do it with copper instead of silver, then or something like that. Potentially. We've seen obviously Sun Drive here in Australia do that, but that's not including any other market, right?

So not including EVs or any other product that contains silver. That's just assuming solar panels solar panel manufacturing continues on its trajectory. By 2050, 90% of the entire production of silver in the world will be just going into solar panel manufacturing. Yeah, but I mean then we have to recycle them.

So that's the that's why it's so important today for us to start keeping those panels in circulation through recycling. So not sending them off to a developing country where they've just they're gone forever. We need to make sure that we can sustainably and economically keep those panels on shore, recycle them and keep those metals and particularly metals. Glass, yes, you're going to be mining sand dunes and stuff to keep making glass.

So that's another conversation to be had. But just focusing on the metals, let's uh make sure we are not losing things like silver, a critical mineral, uh sorry, silicon, a critical mineral, silver, a precious metal, and and copper and aluminium, which is two key metals that we need for the energy transition. We need to keep those in circulation rather than have them lost. Okay.

Now um I did ask you that really long question. You said you unpack it, but we haven't really fully unpacked it. We've got one. So, well, are you kind of at the moment now getting the panels coming in by the truckload, or you still got to kind of put your little lightning towers up there to attract the moth?

I mean, what's happening? Uh a bit of both. So we've picked up a few council drop-off points. So we'll collect somewhere between 100 and 150 panels per collection from uh every time we get a phone call to to replace the bins.

We've got partnerships with distributors like GreenTech. So we'll shout out good old Sam at Green Tech. Green Tech, is that one particular branch or at Thornly. Yeah, so at Thornly, they've been our longest standing partner.

We've had a drop-off point with them for about five years now. So they have been a massive supporter of what we're doing. But how does that work? Do they then charge their installers or are they doing that as one of the services or what?

Or both. So they offer that to their customers to say if you have any old panels, old panels, end-of-life panels, bring them back to Green Tech Thornly, we'll add it to the account, they'll have a solar panel charge and we'll collect them from that branch when they have five, six pallets ready to go. Right, right. So it's just giving that option to their customers so that their installers are able to give a recycling option to the mums and dads out there to try and win more business.

And the one thing that I will try and say is with installers, they fear like an installer will be like, oh, I'm selling my panel for five bucks or ten bucks a pop to the local guy exporting them, right? Gumtree. Gumtree, whatever. So with some installers that we work with, they've never ever sent.

So I'll pick on one again. So perfect solar power has never ever sent. They're a Northern Beaches installer, they've never sent a panel to landfill in their in the history of their business. So we might charge them, let's just use it again, round numbers, $10 per panel to recycle.

They'll charge their customer $15 a panel to recycle. So they still get their $5 a panel. It's just not by selling it on Gumtree, it's by offering a recycling service to their customers. And when they're competing with another installer on the northern beaches, they've got a recycling uh line item on their quote, and the other installer might have disposal.

We'll we'll remove and take it to the tip, and Elliot will have we remove and recycle. And it might be a difference of 50 or 100 or call it $200. I'd let's just be dramatic and say it's double the cost. Customers who are installing solar panels or that have an old system are typically uh environmentally conscious that they're happy to pay an extra hundred, two hundred dollars to have their system recycled rather than disposed.

But I mean, also if you go now into let's give a very specific sample. I've got a person with a three kilowatt system, it was put in 2008, whether we're now 18, it's 17 years old. They looking at a battery, the system was smacked right in the middle of the roof, very hard to get panels around it. But if you take that system off with the 220s, you possibly can put a 12 kilowatt system on the overall roof with the high-efficient panels now.

So there's really no question about leaving the system in place. It just makes no economic sense. It possibly, you know, now with the way that the new rules are from safety and all that, does not comply on so many levels, it will go. Correct.

But now I'm selling them the 12 kilowatt system with a 30 kilowatt hours of a battery. I'm maybe looking at 15, 17, 18 grand, something like that. I won't have a problem to take 12 panels back on a hundred and twenty dollars cost to you as part of absorbing it to win the eighteen thousand dollar job. You'd be surprised, Marcus.

The amount of installers I speak to that like tight asses? No. Hey guys, out there, come on. Who can I mean seriously, you go to the pub one time you spent more than that.

It's a Friday? He's gotta be nice now because you're his customers. He can't kind of nod like that. But I'm gonna tell you, don't be a bloody tight ass.

If you can't build $120 into your quote to get rid of the panels, you get money possibly for the aluminium rails. Um, I mean, seriously, uh you know, oh, there's a great marketing idea just popping up. Yeah. You know what?

We have a graphic design unit and we won't do it for free. But we could actually design for you a participating in the recycling kind of logo that the installers who use your servers are allowed to use in the marketing for themselves as being more environmentally conscious. And guess what? In a place like the Northern Beaches, that'll make a difference.

100%. It does make yeah, it absolutely makes a difference. What a great idea. I'll see how.

Talk about that one. But uh seriously, okay. So so so is are you getting enough stock now? Oh no, no.

The the the capacity of our machinery and what we run at is uh chalk and cheese. We've just upgraded our our line when we I'm not sure if anyone would have seen some of the pub public posting from the New South Wales EPA that they did about our facility, because we recently did a uh official opening of that facility, and that in essence was an upgrade of the older gear to the newer gear that's all been stitched together. It's you've seen it for yourself. There's a nice work platform, there's some pretty cool uh glass transportation systems and and sorting systems.

So that's but in the olden days you set there. There was a little there was it wasn't gold panning, um, but there was a smaller sieve and it was quite separate, and we were still sort of doing batch processing and through that RD phase of developing the machinery, you didn't want to obviously stitch it all together because you're you've you're failing, you're learning, you're changing. So there was a need to have them separate. But now that we are at the fourth version of our D framer, the second version of our D glasser, and we've obviously made a lot of mistakes along the way and we fixed those mistakes.

We've uh been confident enough to stitch them together in one nice little neat package, and we can recycle a single solar panel in under 60 seconds. So before we were obviously much more constrained with the volume that we could receive. Now, not so much. We need as much volume as we can get.

Right, right, right. So if you've got all solar panels, uh PV Industries, Bankstown, isn't it? We're in Bankstown, yeah. You're near the airport, isn't it?

So you can even fly the panels then. Get the moths that you were talking about earlier with the beacons. Possibly not environmentally the smartest way in terms of the CO2. All right.

So we've we we're we know now what your channel is, councils, uh distributors, uh possibly directly installers as well, if they collect enough. If the installers are able to collect a pallet or two, which is probably four, four or eight jobs, there's no reason why we couldn't come every couple of weeks. We I was out this morning picking up a pallet, two pallets of panels from an installer again on the beaches, and he has another 14 on Monday. So every time he does an upgrade, he'll put them on a panel when he gets a pallet, rather, when he gets to two pallets, he'll give me a call and say, Come and take him out of the car park.

Right. Now the question is what type of uh uh panels are kind of going? Well the the wattage or so what do you see? Typically anywhere from 170s to to new panels.

Some sometimes you'll get a what, like a 380, 400, 420. Oh, you'll you'll have you'll have people that have uh damaged the some panels during a construction or the installation of a commercial site. You'll have uh panels that arrive broken at a warehouse, for example, at Green Tech, through the transportation of you know, importing that panel, they've taken it out of the box and oh, that whole pallet's been smashed. So it's not the fault of GreenTech or anyone, like anyone really.

You it's who it's super hard to say who along the chain uh damaged those that pallet, but it there are instances where an entire pallet of new panels has has been smashed. Right, right. But we're not seeing panels of let's say that only got two or three years on the roof or four years and already coming off, are you? Uh yeah, if there's a hail storm.

Right. So there was a large hail storm rolled through Canberra a a few years ago. Uh there was a roof of a government agency campus. There was 3,000 panels across a range of buildings, and we've been progressively recycling every single one of those panels as they get upgraded.

So the installer down there is offered the recycling service. And um every time they have a semi-trailer full, they give us a call and say, Come and pick up a few hundred panels, and we bring them back to us and process them. Okay. Now, um, so we've talked about the the uh glass, we've talked about the aluminium frame.

So those frames, what happens? Do they then kind of put them in another machine somewhere else at a metal recycler and make it all to small pieces, and then it moves back into the recyc into the aluminium uh kind of manufacturing game, isn't it? Do we then in Australia actually still have that aluminium manufacturing, or do just those little bits get cut up and they still get exported anyway? Uh that's a good question.

I believe there are some smelters, particularly like up in the Hunter region, like New Newcastle. They still receive and like melt down the aluminium. I've also heard of obviously metals, including aluminium, getting sent overseas, India, where there's some large foundries, they melt it down, create the billets or the rolls that then go into new extrusion. So it could be either one of those.

Once we sell it to our scrap metal provider, um it you obviously you lose control of what happens to it then, but it will get chipped down, baled up, and then either sent to the hunter or sent to a smelter or foundry somewhere around the world or maybe in Adelaide. I think there's foundries in Adelaide. So is it more efficient from an aluminium point of view? And then uh I'll I'll ask that again.

From a uh energy input uh level, aluminium actually needs a lot of energy to be generated. There would be some savings reusing the existing aluminium over making brand new one, wouldn't it? It's ninety to the It's ninety to ninety-five percent more energy efficient to recycle aluminium over mining virgin bauxite, refining, smelting, and manufacturing new aluminium. Ooh, that's a lot.

Yeah, heaps. Oh, and with energy prices going up, gee, everybody'd be looking for solar panels. Maybe it'll be one day like the copper where they just pinch it. Oh, my solar panels are gone, what happened?

Oh, somebody made money out of it from the recycling. It's not worth as much as copper, unfortunately. Now, um, so we've got the glass taken care of, we've got the aluminium taken care of, but there's still laminate, there are still the cells, there's still the buzz bars. Yeah.

So what's the story with that now? Great question. So that's the really profitable part, but difficult part. So nobody in the world has cracked the code to commercially extract silver from a panel at a large scale.

So we've extracted silver from the laminate at a lab scale. Similarly, I think one other company in Australia has done that. And there's a couple others around the world as well. So we're not we were the first in Australia and one of the few in the world that had done that a few years ago, but now others have done the same thing.

The volumes aren't there today to go and justify buying a large chemical extraction facility or or plant to extract copper and silver from the panel. It's too expensive to to buy and to run based on the number of laminates that we would be producing today. So it's a feedstock issue. We need more panels to go and justify it.

We need more panels to go and justify it. We need more panels. It's a European coming out of me, Marms are flailing everywhere. But we need more panels as an industry to come back to us to recycle so we can build up that uh feedstock, that stockpile of laminates to start extracting the metals.

It's not that we can't do it, it's that we uh don't have the funding or the feedstock currently to justify going and spending millions of dollars on a chemical extraction facility. So what happens to them then? We keep them stored up, so they only take uh it's only a pallet space, and they're less than a meter knee high on a pallet, and that's about a thousand it'd be somewhere between six hundred and a thousand panels on a pallet at that point, because they're only a millimeter thick and one to two and a half kilos, depending on obviously the the age and the size of that laminate.

If it's an old 60 cell kind of 170 water, it's probably one to one point two kilos, one point five kilos maybe. And if it's an a bigger sort of 30 kilo or 26 kilo panel, you're looking at about two and a half kilos. So it's very small, thin, it's very light, there's nothing dangerous about it, it's not gonna overheat, it's not gonna get the sunlight hitting it and and suddenly melt. Yeah, yeah.

So there we we store those panels, uh laminates, we store the laminates and we use them for RD. So we have at least four different irons in the fire to uh with different companies or uh universities that are looking at different chemical pathways to extract the metals from that product. So we grind it down into a black powder, it's called solar metal. That solar metal is the world's richest silver mine.

So the world's richest silver mine is not in the ground somewhere, it's on people's roofs. And we need to get those panels back, process them, create solar metal. I mean, can't you just throw that all into a fire and melt it down? Yeah, in theory you can.

The that's a that's a big that's a big one. So there's there's lots of different gases that you'll create through that process. It's very energy intensive to use that process. You need a very big furnace to put however many panels you want to process.

So, from a throughput perspective, mechanical recycling techniques are the most efficient for scale. So you need to reduce that panel size, you need to get rid of the aluminium frame because that like glass, the amount of energy dense the energy that that glass will absorb to heat up, you're gonna be consuming way more energy than you need to than if you were to just heat up, let's say, a laminate. But then a laminate to get to that point, you you're then increasing the percentage of plastics, so the amount of scrubbing systems you're gonna need to clean up the off gases from burning the back sheet and the EVA is gonna be quite expensive.

I'm not sure about the EPA legislation around the the off-gases from those types of products, but also pyrolysis, so thermal treatment of waste is something that the New South Wales EPA is looking to move away from. So when we received our government grant funding, one of the conditions was that it was not a thermal treatment process. It needed to be mechanical. It's more energy, much more energy efficient.

We have solar panels on the roof of our warehouses, both in Sydney and in Melbourne. So even actually in Melbourne, it's the first recycling plant in the country to be net energy negative. So they produce about twice the amount of electricity that they use as a recycling. So you've got another facility in Melbourne, have you?

Correct. Yeah. And we share that facility with our uh sister company called Resource. They recycle e-waste.

So it's a lot, that's a much larger 20 tons an hour type shredding line. So that consumes, as you can imagine, a heap of energy. It's an 800-and something kilowatt system on the roof of that warehouse. So our operations utilize renewable energy.

We use mechanical separation until we get to that laminate point at which we'll go down a chemical path where we'll separate the plastics from the metal and then process the metals because those plastics have some nasties that will be released in the form of off-gases that we want to avoid. Gee, there's a whole science to it. I thought it was just a bloke with a sledgehammer. Yeah, well, you can imagine back in 2019 when it's like just sell them on Gumtree or can you pay me for these panels?

Unfortunately, it's uh it's gonna take a bit more than a bit more than that to recycle these things. Now, when I visited your facility, you gave me like a little kind of round jar and it had that black powder in it. That's the backing sheet and the uh the silver and the all the bus bars, all just ground down. The backing sheet's not in that product that's been separated.

Uh-huh. So that product was just the cells. Probably some EVA that's been caught up in there, but it essentially the back sheet's been removed. The bulk of the EVA is also gone.

It's just a mix of the silicon, the silver, the copper, just the the cells. So when you look at the cells and anything that's in them or on them has been uh ground down. I didn't see like a grinding machine kind of in your thing that's happening off site at the moment, or what? Or you got you got something there too, or we had we have something there too.

It's not a a big impressive machine on a work platform like you saw. It's a smaller lab scale grinder that we use. Uh that will when we go and purchase that chemical line, we'll purchase a uh a larger scale grinder to to grind down the laminate instead of having to cut them down into smaller pieces, we can grind down larger panels or at least larger pieces of panels. Um so yeah, we haven't, like I say, we haven't got the commercial capacity to go and powderize and chemically extract the metal from the laminate, but we have the capacity to grind it down lab scale and then give that solar metal kilos of it.

So we're not talking little jars, we're talking buckets of solar metal to uh industry partners like companies here in Australia and overseas, and also universities here in Australia like to then work out a way that we can kind of extract the valuable metals and the silicon has that got a value? At the moment it does not in Australia. We haven't found a company willing to buy the silicon. There is some companies overseas that are willing to take it, but once you obviously transport it, you erode any profit that you would potentially make.

We're also speaking with some partners to look at some new RD projects to put that silicon back into like an alloy manufacturing process. So not pure silicon, but can they be reused for solar panels theoretically? You can, yeah, but uh like we discussed earlier, 90 something percent of panels in the world are manufactured in China. So we need to get that silicon back.

Yeah, seriously, but I mean um there are no schemes in the world where you say you give it to us, we use it, but at the part of the cycle you have to take it back. So I mean that can be put into the equation because if somebody's gone from fifteen hundred dollars of a panel to a hundred dollars a panel, there's enough bloody profit in there uh to okay, the panel goes back up to 120. Nobody's gonna click an eye. What's that, a 20-panel solar system?

That's $400 more. We add it to it, but now we have a sustainable industry. Um, I just wish politicians would really think that through and enact it because sometimes you do need some rules to do the right thing by the environment. Uh there's a lot of brochures written about it, but practical applications, I'd like to see a bit more.

But uh coming back to that, so you're sitting there at the moment, you've got the two key products, you got to stream for that, it costs now 10, gone down from $30. You're working with universities and others to find the extraction way for the metal and all that. But uh from a financial point of view, um you kind of start in 2018, the feedstock is still not 100% enough. So in 2018 would have been even less.

How do you sustain yourself with passion for seven years on a grinding road? What it sounds like. Yeah, it's been uh And you haven't got even grey hair. They're hiding.

I can promise you. I mean, what's gone through your own thing? I mean, you're definitely onto something, but you're a bit like the bloke who turns up every Saturday hoping for the lot of numbers to come, place the same numbers, and we know mathematically one time these numbers will come up, yeah, but it could be in two weeks or it could be in 40 years or 400. Well I was gonna say 400, yeah.

May not even see those numbers come up. Uh but yeah, you're right. It's been a long road. Uh I'm not gonna sugarcoat it.

It would have been more beneficial for me to stay in a corporate job and make plenty more money doing that than what I am doing. But uh is it a bit like Lotto now or maybe roulette, where you've gone to black, it's gone red, you doubled, and you keep on doubling because you think eventually my number it's gotta be one time black. Are you are you kind of in that game where you go, shit, I've invested so much into it now. Um look at all these laminates that are kind of piling up there.

There's millions literally sitting there in silver. Every time the silver price goes up, you go yippie yay, but it's so close and still so far. Yeah, and uh that's a a big part of our longevity has been due to the grants that we've been able to receive. So the New South Wales EPA, as I said, have given us two separate grants.

They had a specific grant project that was put forward back in 2019 called the Circular Solar Grant Programme, or it was a Circular Solar Trial, which was phase one, and then the Circular Solar Grant Program, which is phase two. Collectively, that program was worth about $10 million. And Gladys, back in the day, she was the one that brought forward that promise and delivered on that. And over the last, let's say, five years, we have been able to deliver on what we've said we were going to do in terms of developing this machinery capable of recycling solar panels in under 60 seconds and over 90%.

So that's what we've done so far with the help of the New South Wales EPA, Sustainability Victoria, and now the federal government as well have most recently given us some grant funding. So without that, I don't think there's any question that we wouldn't have been able to succeed or survive. We've also seen a few different businesses come and go in the last seven years. There's been at least three solar panel recyclers that I can recall that have uh have been and gone.

So I say there was we we we weren't the first. There was a company called Reclaim PB that had uh the title of Australia's you know, oldest solar panel recycler. They started, I think, in 2016. We came along in 2018, so there was us two at the time.

And well, let's let's say two or three years ago, they also went into administration, and we claim that sort of Stephen Bradbury title of the oldest solar panel recycler now in the country. So it's not just something that's happened overnight that businesses have gone into administration, it's been happening for the last five years. Circle aren't alone in this conversation. Uh and there's been a circle of companies who've gone bust.

Do you like that? That was good. I saw I see what you did there. But it just goes to show that it's super important to be able to sort of juggle the government support, the government grant to continue the RD and also not like underpromise, over deliver, I guess is what I'm trying to say.

So don't go too hard too soon and say, oh, we can do all this cool stuff. We've been super transparent with with our customers to say this is what we do, this is the proof from the government that have backed us to deliver what we're saying. So we have the capability to do that, but we're not going to sit here and tell you that we can recycle 100% of a solar panel and extract the silver because that's just factually incorrect. And if I set that expectation with you, but then I go and charge you uh $10 a panel to recycle your panel your systems, I'll you'll be like, well, it doesn't check out.

Because at the point in time we either receive a government rebate, i.e., stewardship scheme, where it will be recycling will be paid for by the government to do what we do, or the industry starts to extract the valuable materials like the silver, again, the cost will come down. So, you know, we I again super transparent, even with yourself and anyone listening to this is like, oh, James isn't recycling all of a solar panel.

Well, no, because no one is. It's not just because I'm not. The wh no one in the industry is extracting silver. When we interviewed the circle person at the Brisbane show only a few months ago, they actually gave me a number that they were uh kind of uh recycling 98% out of a panel.

Um maybe they were counting grinding it down to the same level. So it'd be very interesting to see. But obviously uh if we get the volume and silver is still going up and there's uh so much silver in the solar panels, I do would say if it is uh physical or chemically possible without totally creating huge pollutions again, then I'd say that'll be something we see. But moving forward into you just mentioned something interesting about the government.

I mean, when I was running LG and I'm responsible in my team to bring a hundred million panels into Australia, I wouldn't have minded oh, this is over a 10-12 year period, by the way. I wouldn't have minded if the government would have said to me, listen, uh there's gonna be two cents per watt, which is about eight, nine bucks on a current panel, that we add extra to the cost of a panel now, because we want to pay at the end of it for these panels to be recycled economically, and therefore there needs to be an input cost at the beginning.

But I mean our panels at the time were 85 cents, um, eighty-seven. If everybody would have been hit with it, it wouldn't have made a huge difference. And I would have been quite willing to accept that for the fact that we're supposed to be the clean and green industry, and still I would say at least one-third of the panels that are now getting to end of life will end up stacked up in a paddock, still going to some tip somewhere in no went's land, getting dumped, and the materials not extracted, they're not properly recycled, and if we're supposed to help the world to become a cleaner and cleaner place, God help us.

We're not doing such a great job. And I think there is time and room for regulation for stewardship, what do you call them? Stewardship schemes. And I only encourage the minister to get on with it because he's actually responsible, in my math, for at least 300 to 400,000 panels in the last few months coming off roofs early because people needed bigger systems due to the battery rebound.

Yeah, for sure. But again, the He's not going to be saying a lot of bad things about the Minister because he needs the Minister to help him there. But I can do that. And I say, come on, get on with it.

He's only he's inherited this issue, right? He's only been there since let's say January. When was the election? March was it?

No, Chris Bowen has been the minister. No, no, no, it's not Chris, it's in the environment portfolio. Ah. So that's where the difficulty lies.

You've got Chris Bowen that has all Chris Bowen's created the energy waste with the battery rebate now suddenly, you know, creating this inefficient panels coming off roofs because they can't really drive the battery. But it's the environment minister, is it? Yes. So the the the issue of stewardship and and waste sits within well, recycling sits within the waste portfolio.

So it was previously Tanya Plibisek. I I can't recall how long she was the minister for, but I'm pretty sure there was a predecessor before her. It's been on the minister's uh stewardship priority list for next year will be ten years. Since twenty sixteen it was put on the minister's priority list.

I love that. A priority list with a ten-year waiting time. Gee, you'd really don't want it to be a real priority. So who's the new minister?

Uh Minister Watt. See, pardon the pun. Solar panels. Mr.

Watt, look after the solar panels. They are Watts. Yeah, what's up? Uh but yeah, it's uh it's one of those things that unfortunately keep getting pushed to the side.

And no, no, no, no. We're gonna hammer you guys with it. I'm really sick of it. I really want to see something done.

We're gonna make some wonderful TikTok clips and we're gonna feature you, and you're never gonna get your money. I'll come and look knocking on your door at that point then. No, no, we wouldn't do that to you. But that opens a whole new question because um what goes hand in hand with solar panels are batteries.

Yeah, good guess. And we're just putting them all out there, and some of them are already arriving dead on arrival. I mean, there shit can happen, stuff can drop. Sometimes quality control wasn't that good.

And I know specifically of one large manufacturer who currently has and had batteries in the market for a while, who has them sitting there currently in a warehouse, and it's cheaper to just store them here. It's a bit like the uranium waste that's from uh the Lucas Hyde thing, sitting somewhere there for many decades in drums that have to be replaced because they're dry they're they're rusting out now. Wow. Um and they're just sitting there in the warehouse because it's the cheapest way to keep it at the moment, and there is no recycling available.

So um and when I spoke to the circle guy, I'm sorry to bring your competitor up all the time, but now that they go and bust, we're allowed to. Um he said, I said, Oh, and what about batteries? There's a great business ready for batteries, and he says, Oh, we don't touch those. They'll burn our facilities down.

We can't crush them, we can't do this. So, what's the issue with batteries? I mean, you you studied definitely panels backwards, I can pick that up. What do you know about battery recycling?

We've done some testing. It was it was a part of both of the different grants that we've received from the New South Wales EPA to look at battery recycling as well. So we've developed A discharge unit with the CSIRO to look at pulling all the energy out of the battery. Because the reason the fires start in the first place is because there are there is energy stored in the battery.

So we need to remove any residual energy before crushing it. If you don't do that and you go down the path of crushing it, like our circle friend said, you'll cause fires in the in the in the factory. So you can't have that. That is 101 safety risks.

Fires in the waste and recycling sector is the biggest cause of injury, downtime, insurance increase, premiums. So there's pollution. Pollution. So yeah, batteries and fires are the bane of the recycling industry's existence, particularly with like inappropriate disposal.

But I mean they're only going to come more of those with the EVs. I can smell an investor's golden opportunity here. There are some companies that are doing this. We've looked at it.

So it is super expensive to just do the testing. Just do it like Mythbusters. They all hide behind a bit of a glass thing, they go like that. Bang.

Maybe, maybe we're doing it wrong. We should start a TV channel and start blowing batteries. Will it blend and just put it in there? But battery, yeah.

Look, batteries, you've got your lithium-ion power tool batteries that have a certain density. Your batteries from a home solar system might have a has another increased density, and then EV batteries are the highest energy density sort of battery that there are. So all of these have various different challenges, and when we say density, it's just how much energy is crammed into that cell. And again, what does that mean?

If you if something goes wrong, how big's the bang? That's the long and the short of it. So we need to make sure that batteries are either safely discharged or we have a an appropriate processing mechanism that ensures when a battery in a state of charge gets recycled, it doesn't pose a safety risk to the workers or the environment. Could you just kind of put in a big concrete kind of area safe away from somebody, just put these batteries out and just have a tank drive over them or something like that?

And then it goes, you know, like boom, but not much, and then whatever is left, you you move that into the recycling machine? We can ask the EPA maybe. Or the Department of War, is that the question? I mean, no, no, no, we don't.

That's America. We're still defense. I know. We're defending ourselves, we don't get aggressively moving forward.

But um I'm just wondering seriously, I you know the question is to be asked what happens if you do a car battery, it's still got a bit of charge in it, and drive a tank over it? I'd just be curious. It's a mythbuster's myth that you should be you should be exploring. No, but I mean you should know this and you should be able to explain what would happen.

What happens if you if you drive a tank over it? The tank over explode that much. Or you put it in the back of a garbage truck and it gets crushed. It'll explode.

Right. Yes. But does it have to have a fire as well, or is it just a good healthy explosion? It'll explode and it'll be a healthy fire.

And the issue with battery fires is they're Oh, now I'm getting technical. Is it endothermic rather than exothermic? So they they breathe from the inside out. So you can't just pour water on it, it's gonna put it out.

It's gonna continue to smolder and you've got to get the oxygen away from it, is it? Yeah, the oxygen, but it feeds the fire feeds itself. And even even with so let's just move away from the fire side of things and say, what are we gonna do with the product when we get it out? We don't have the requisite processing capability in Australia to start extracting the lithium and the cobalt and the manganese.

It's still an ore, so we have to sell we'll we we would be sending that ore or black mass overseas as well. So the the the processing capability is one thing, but it's also the downstream buyers of those products. Unfortunately, as time has gone on, Australia has moved down the economic complexity index because we don't manufacture things here anymore. What do we do here?

We have public service, some banks, and education. Uh-huh, uh uh. What about all the warehouses near the airport and near the port where we import stuff and then people just put in different boxes, put different labels of it, and ship it out and resell it. That's a very big industry in Australia.

It is big, probably not as big as education, though. Completely ignored. I mean 80% of you know, low-skilled people work there, and there's nothing wrong with that. And we all buy from those websites the staff, you know?

But where do they get manufactured is the key thing, right? Well, is two countries, three Pakistan, India, Vietnam, and there's another one I forgot now. China. That old chestnut.

But if it's a it's like we joke about it, but it's a it's an issue, right? We need to make sure that there are buyers. Because as a recycling industry, you need to have buyers for the products that you produce. Otherwise we're gonna have to take it.

But I mean again, if we bring this stuff in, part of the export-import negotiation should be you take it, or the government should deliberately, in the name of national interest, decide that we're not anymore the country that just digs up and sends out, but we actually value adding to it, which means we would actually develop some industries that have some manufacturing capability, and just from a national uh interest point of view and security point of view, I mean I'm worried if we have a sea blockade, we might be short of toilet paper and plastic buckets.

Again. And those two go hand in hand during COVID. Jesus, don't visualize. No, I was just wondering how long do you think it took for people who stockpiled toilet paper in their homes to get through the stockpile?

Yeah, true, but I mean, would have made a perfect Christmas gift. Wrap it up. It's a really big box, you go, oh, what's that? You know?

And it is, and you never got enough. True. You know? And it never expires.

I mean, there's no use by date on you know it doesn't get a bit toilet paper. No, it doesn't dry out and get a bit crusty. Anyway. Oh, yeah, well, we wouldn't want that to happen, would we, Marcus?

Anyway, we're going totally off topic. I was having a serious discussion. Are we ready for battery recycling? Uh I don't well.

I'd say not yet. Not with the volume of batteries that are going in and the capacity that we have in Australia to recycle batteries. We're not there yet. But are you seeing an opportunity there, for example, for your business to get into?

Yeah, for sure. We, as I said, we've explored it, we've looked we've looked into it, but unfortunately the lower hanging fruit for us is solar panels. And whilst there is that carrot of batteries in the future, we need to make sure that we've get that one right, we've secured our future. We do not want to become another statistic.

We want to make sure that we are here for the long term and don't get distracted with the battery problem. We want to focus on our core business, which is solar panels. And whilst we have done testing and RD on battery recycling and we have our own learnings, it's a very expensive area, which uh we Because of all the safety aspects and the insurances and all the fire is all the fire is that's associated with batteries. I can just imagine he goes to the insurance underwriter and goes up Thing of adding batteries, the old ones, you know, the ones that are not as stable anymore.

Um we'll put about 500 of those in the back of the shed and we'll drive a tank over them. No, no, no, that was just a silly idea. Come on, come on. You knew I wasn't serious.

And we're near Bankstone Airport. So uh get is this insurable? Yeah, it's not and there have been like a lot of battery fires, as you'd be aware, not just in garbage trucks and tips around the country, but they have I think in 2020 there was a r a really big warehouse fire which is caused by a stockpile of batteries. So but let's just kind of not be the scaremongerers here now.

When you hear about battery fires in general, it's usually the little ones that get imported on the cheap e-bikes or other toys, and then they either get charged, they lose their charger, and the plug works off the other one and they put it in, and then basically the charge rate is not compatible to what the battery management system thinks it can do. The baby overheats, and bingo, off you've got a problem. The other alternative is it's not really driving my e-bike that much anymore.

I don't need it, and I just hide it amongst a little white plastic bag amongst all my other rubbish, put it in the bin, it goes to the back of the truck, it gets compacted, it goes boom, and those are the fires. So the home battery systems and the EV battery systems, which have a software-controlled battery management system, as long as you don't kind of leave your house for five years, don't care about it, don't monitor the battery, and things could start cooking away in the kitchen now.

That stuff from all statistics is safe. It is only when you then try to recycle it and you're extracting it, at which point you either have to open it up, cut it, grind it, whatever else you do with it. Have I got that so far right? Yeah, you don't want to be cutting you don't want to be cutting a battery in a state of charge, I can promise you, with a grinder that will end in tears or a blown-off arm.

Right, okay. So But you're right. It there's nothing unsafe about a battery. A battery is super safe until it's not.

And the only reasons it's not is if it's had an impact or has been discharged or charged too quickly and it's had thermal runaway. So But I mean, in the testing, they even shoot nails into these batteries. Yeah, we and they're designed to handle that. Yeah, we've done the same thing as well to try and you we we we want to try and cause a a fire, but you're doing it in a really small battery instead of a home battery.

So you take a a single cell out of the pack from the battery itself, not just you know because those batteries, a lot of them are made out of little small little ones, isn't it? All together put together. Yeah, this is obviously oversimplified, but think of a double A and there's just a hundred of them in a on your wall. It's not just a pack of six energizers, it's a thousand in a nice little Tesla package.

Reminds me of those little red firecrackers when they get going. Bang, bang, bang, bang. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's probably probably not too far off the truth.

Yeah. Okay, so look, we're getting a clear picture. It's it's it's not just honeymooning and all that. You've got to find the stock, you've got to find where to put it, but at the end of the day, you're saving uh raw material, you're helping the environment.

But running a business itself, so how many staff you got? We've got two guys in the warehouse here in Sydney. Uh there's three of us in the office, and then similarly down in Melbourne, we've got a guy in the warehouse and uh Troy, our my business partner, who is in the office down there. So there's probably what, two, four, say six of us?

So it's still a relatively small business. Definitely a small business. But the trick is not to have too many uh staff overheads, because that's what's going to kill you in the short term until the panel volumes really ramp up and we're inundated with panels, which is a great problem to have. We we want to keep obviously overheads as low as possible.

But that means also you as the boss can't really delegate jobs away and go and sit in the office and just kind of go yippy dee, yippy dee, like a general kind of pulling all the strings. You've got to still do a lot of hands-on stuff, do you? 100%. I was picking up panels this morning from an installer and then dropped off uh a piece of a machine that we had fixed at another provider, contractor, and then came here to do a podcast with you, Marcus.

So there's you're wearing many hats as a small business owner, I can promise you. Right, right. Now I'll give you a quick sample of the kind of headaches this poor guy goes through to the moment. So when we went to his facility, the D-glaser at that point in time had just stopped working.

And obviously, you there was a steel plate or something that had cracked, or what was the issue? Uh that one there was some issues with some of the plates that got replaced and and fixed up. Uh so yeah, we had a a period of downtime for the for the D-glasser. And then so if you because it's homemade, kind of not homemade, but it's uh sorry, not I always insult my podcast partners without even.

Sounds like I'm the nutty professor doing like home home brew in the corner here. No, no, but because you through your scientific and engineering skills developed the D-classer uh because you're moving in a new industry yourself. If anything breaks, there isn't like a company you can ring in Italy, fly me this plant out. Correct, we gotta do it ourselves.

You've got to get it manufactured, yeah, fixed and or either remanufactured or fixed up. And so we we build the machines in Wollongong. There's a manufacturer, uh a fabricator that we use down there. Obviously, it's not Steel City, I think, is Newcastle, isn't it?

Wollongong's probably a close second. So yeah, Wollongong, we get them manufactured, and then we have some contractors here in Western Sydney where we lean on them when we have an issue to to do some welding or come and remanufacture a plate or whatever it might need to be. All of the stuff that we manufacture, all the IP that we own, all is all kept onshore. Wow, wow.

So I mean think about it, you know. This guy, if you go to Newtown to one of the coffee shops, you know, wear a bit of a baggy hoodie thing, and you'd be telling people, I'm in solar panel recycling, you'd get a groovy grout hanging around you and think you're really, really a special guy. But the truth is you're really more in Western Sydney grinding it out. Yeah, I'm definitely not hanging around in Newtown sipping coffees on the morning, Marcus.

I can promise you. I mean Condell Park or somewhere in around Bankstown getting my coffee before put putting helping some panels get put through the pro the system. Yeah, yeah. Avoiding a couple of road rage incidents nearby.

All right. Gee, we're we're very um you know, stereotypical here now. Very not fair. Sorry.

If you see him, don't complain about the podcast to him, it's not his fault. You got big shoulders, big broad shoulders, you can wear it. Look, we're getting silly. I think we got anything.

Is there any other thing we'll give you an opportunity for a short plug? If you if you have spare solar panels sitting up your back shed, he's your guy, but you've got to pay a little bit. Um is a is a a plug we can offer you here? Uh 30 seconds.

The whole thing's a plug, isn't it, isn't it, Marcus? Hasn't paid for it. I think the the one thing that I'd like to I I guess leave an installer with is don't call me when you have a pile of panels because then you're paying for it. Call me when you're about to replace a pile of panels and let the customer pay for it.

Give them the option to recycle or put that in the quote, add the margin, you're still gonna get your extra five dollars per panel because you're proactively charging your customer for that service. Whereas if you call me when you've decommissioned them, you've put them in your warehouse, you're like, oh no, I have 400 panels sitting in my shed or whatever, then it's gonna cost you, let's just, again, 10 bucks a panel. And it's like, oh, I didn't account for that. But if you call me beforehand, build it into the quote, build it into your proposal, use it as a marketing tool, say we recycle, because the other guy probably won't be.

You'll win the job, and it you won't be out of pocket, you'll make some money off of it at the same time. Bloody good advice. And if it's an old one and a half kilowatt system, that's only six panels. Yeah, hardly anything to really blink your eye about.

Well, thank you so much. I hope you've learned something. I certainly have. Apology for the humour.

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