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Solar Edge Inverters, returns recycling policy

Solar Photovoltaic (PV)

Last Post by Majordennisbloodnok 10 months ago

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AllyFish

(@allyfish)

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Topic starter 01/10/2024 9:03 pm

Sharing this for info, which was posted on LinkedIn by a disgruntled Solar Edge installer. They are no longer accepting faulty inverter returns but asking installers to ‘recycle them’ - easier said than done without cost to a tradesman.

How irresponsible of them. Inverters should be repairable electronic items, not just thrown away. They claim they are doing this as part of their ‘sustainability policy’ - make of that what you will.

This topic was modified 10 months ago 2 times by AllyFish

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Mars

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01/10/2024 10:24 pm

Ridiculous! It’s the complete opposite of sustainability, and the fact that most of these SolarEdge inverters will now end up in landfill is nothing short of environmental negligence. How is this even acceptable? Only thing I will say is that this post is from the U.S. and I wonder if this disastrous policy applies globally?

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Majordennisbloodnok

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02/10/2024 11:05 am

It would be interesting to see how SolarEdge are claiming to comply with their WEEE obligations under UK legislation. It may yet be that they can't adopt that strategy in this country; let's see.

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IanMK13

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02/10/2024 2:27 pm

Posted by: @majordennisbloodnok

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It would be interesting to see how SolarEdge are claiming to comply with their WEEE obligations under UK legislation. It may yet be that they can't adopt that strategy in this country; let's see.

and the EU WEE directive on which the UK version is based.

A quick Google suggests that it's the local distributor who is responsible for WEEE compliance. Solaredge appear to be trying to spin this as a 'Green' initiative but I suspect it is more to reduce their own return and disposal costs. I don't know the products to which the statement refers but perhaps they are encapsulated or otherwise not readily maintainable/repairable.

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Majordennisbloodnok

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02/10/2024 3:09 pm

Agreed, @ianmk13.

Under UK WEEE legislation (and probably the EU equivalent although I haven't looked into that closely), both the manufacturer and the distributor have obligations. In this case, I suspect the local installer fits the category of "distributor" and therefore has the responsibility for disposing of the old kit. However, the manufacturer (the "producer" in WEEE terms) still has to register with a Producer Compliance Scheme and pay their share towards financing the collection, treatment, recovery and disposal of WEEE.

Long and short of it is that since SolarEdge's and the installer's respective WEEE responsibilities are already fairly well defined, I'm not sure any maneouvring SolarEdge might try would produce any significant benefit, but it'll be interesting to see.

This post was modified 10 months ago by Mars

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