Skills and the circular economy: a look at whole life planning of solar energy

Solar is being deployed at scale across low- and middle-income countries. However, nobody is planning for what happens at the end of their life cycle. Panels degrade, systems fail, and the people managing that process - informal workers operating without safety standards, training, or recognition - are largely invisible to the supply chains that put the equipment there in the first place.

The result is a growing liability: environmental, economic, and social. With case studies in Malawi, Rwanda, Kenya, India, and Nepal, an Engineering X review found batteries being informally smelted and cables open-air burned to recover copper, with minimal protective equipment and little pollution control. The workers doing this aren’t classified as part of the solar supply chain. Without deliberate end-of-life planning, today's clean energy expansion creates tomorrow's waste and safety crisis, concentrated in the communities least equipped to absorb it.

This session will treat this as an engineering and skills problem, and examines what a circular approach actually requires in practice: extending product lifetimes through repair and refurbishment, building viable collection and reverse logistics in dispersed off-grid settings, enabling safe material recovery, and embedding responsibility across the value chain from design through to decommissioning.

Drawing on two newly published reports - the Green Skills Symposium summary report and the High-level review of the end of life of photovoltaic infrastructure in low- and middle-income countries - expert panellists will address what skills exist, what is missing, and where the pressure points are. The session will also focus on practical routes to professionalise and support informal repair and recovery ecosystems, and to build local technical capacity that delivers both environmental and social value.