Alberta is banning discarded solar panels from provincial landfills and requiring buyers of new panels to fund their eventual recycling, creating what the government calls North America’s first dedicated solar-panel recycling program.

Beginning Oct. 1, expired solar panels will have to be directed toward reuse or recycling instead of being dumped in municipal landfills.

“Alberta has never been afraid to lead,” Environment Minister Grant Hunter said. “We will not wait until mountains of dead solar panels are piling up in our landfills before acting.”

Alberta has the second-largest installed solar capacity in Canada. By 2045, the province expects more than 95 percent of the panels currently installed to have reached the end of their roughly 25-year lifespan, potentially generating 72,700 tonnes of waste.

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Unlike the symbolic environmental policies typically imposed on oil and gas producers, Alberta’s program deals with the full environmental cost of renewable energy.

Solar panels contain glass, aluminum, silicon, silver, copper and other recoverable materials. The province says recycling them could conserve landfill space, support domestic processing and create new jobs and investment.

An environmental fee of $14 will be charged on every new solar panel supplied in Alberta after Oct. 1. The money will pay for the collection, transportation and recycling of both existing and newly supplied panels.

The fee will not apply retroactively to panels already installed.

For a typical residential system containing 20 panels, the fee would actually total $280. The government’s news release incorrectly calculated the amount as $240. Either way, officials say the charge would represent less than 1.5 percent of the overall installation cost.

“Responsible solar energy growth means considering environmental responsibility throughout its lifecycle,” Affordability and Utilities Minister RJ Sigurdson said.

The approach ensures people purchasing solar panels pay for their eventual disposal, rather than handing municipalities and taxpayers a cleanup bill decades from now.

Alberta expanded its electronics recycling regulations in 2024 to cover solar panels, wind-turbine components and electric-vehicle batteries. The province and the Alberta Recycling Management Authority will now work with industry to expand domestic reuse and recycling capacity as the volume of expired equipment grows.

That is real environmentalism: identifying an approaching waste problem, making the industry responsible for it and recovering usable materials instead of pretending so-called green technology has no environmental footprint.