Wind Turbine Blades Can’t Be Recycled

[Gone_Fishin]

Wind Turbine Blades Can’t Be Recycled, So They’re Piling Up in Landfills





A wind turbine’s blades can be longer than a Boeing 747 wing, so at the end of their lifespan they can’t just be hauled away. First, you need to saw through the lissome fiberglass using a diamond-encrusted industrial saw to create three pieces small enough to be strapped to a tractor-trailer.

The municipal landfill in Casper, Wyoming, is the final resting place of 870 blades whose days making renewable energy have come to end. The severed fragments look like bleached whale bones nestled against one another.

“That’s the end of it for this winter,” said waste technician Michael Bratvold, watching a bulldozer bury them forever in sand. “We’ll get the rest when the weather breaks this spring.”

Tens of thousands of aging blades are coming down from steel towers around the world and most have nowhere to go but landfills. In the U.S. alone, about 8,000 will be removed in each of the next four years. Europe, which has been dealing with the problem longer, has about 3,800 coming down annually through at least 2022, according to BloombergNEF. It’s going to get worse: Most were built more than a decade ago, when installations were less than a fifth of what they are now.

Built to withstand hurricane-force winds, the blades can’t easily be crushed, recycled or repurposed. That’s created an urgent search for alternatives in places that lack wide-open prairies. In the U.S., they go to the handful of landfills that accept them, in Lake Mills, Iowa; Sioux Falls, South Dakota; and Casper, where they will be interred in stacks that reach 30 feet under.

“The wind turbine blade will be there, ultimately, forever,” said Bob Cappadona, chief operating officer for the North American unit of Paris-based Veolia Environnement SA, which is searching for better ways to deal with the massive waste. “Most landfills are considered a dry tomb.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features ... -landfills

[Queen K]

<-----human beings trying to solve energy problems.

[Jlabute]

Maybe one could melt fiberglass at 2075 F only to use more energy than ever generated in the recycling process. Dealing with toxic fumes and what to do with what is remaining tainted glass I suppose leaves you no further ahead? Either way, these things should be outlawed. Wind turbines kill more living creatures including humans performing maintenance all to give people who profess to not wanting power, to have power.

Not much you can say to those enviro-nuts other than, "Eat Twigs and wear leaves!"

[1791]

Maybe one could melt fiberglass at 2075 F only to use more energy than ever generated in the recycling process. Dealing with toxic fumes and what to do with what is remaining tainted glass I suppose leaves you no further ahead? Either way, these things should be outlawed. Wind turbines kill more living creatures including humans performing maintenance all to give people who profess to not wanting power, to have power.

Not much you can say to those enviro-nuts other than, "Eat Twigs and wear leaves!"

Might be the quote of the year so far !

[GordonH]

I'm throwing this idea out there:
1) Grind up used fiberglass
2) then add fresh fiber mix it together (to bind everything together)
3) infuse resin with mix into... 6 to 8 feet long... 4 inch diameter mould with a point.

Add paint pigment (any colour) to resin & bingo you have fence posts that will last decades.
If fade just take sander to them to restore the colour.

Added: must design something for mass production

[Bleach]

I'm throwing this idea out there:
1) Grind up used fiberglass
2) then add fresh fiber mix it together (to bind everything together)
3) infuse resin with mix into... 6 to 8 feet long... 4 inch diameter mould with a point.

Add paint pigment (any colour) to resin & bingo you have fence posts that will last decades.
If fade just take sander to them to restore the colour.

Added: must design something for mass production

Not feasible, or they would grind them to remake the parts or have more space to dispose of them. I think the cost will drive any propest of doing anything with them.

[Ranger66]

Perhaps someone could use them to build a wall?

[floppi]

I'm throwing this idea out there:
1) Grind up used fiberglass
2) then add fresh fiber mix it together (to bind everything together)
3) infuse resin with mix into... 6 to 8 feet long... 4 inch diameter mould with a point.

Add paint pigment (any colour) to resin & bingo you have fence posts that will last decades.
If fade just take sander to them to restore the colour.

Added: must design something for mass production

It makes too much sense so it won't be done.....is my guess. Instead, we can look at the pretty picture with used wind turbine blades on a hillside and complain.

[spooker]

But OP left out the other parts of the original article that talked about how companies are working on the problem ...

One start-up, Global Fiberglass Solutions, developed a method to break down blades and press them into pellets and fiber boards to be used for flooring and walls. The company started producing samples at a plant in Sweetwater, Texas, near the continent’s largest concentration of wind farms. It plans another operation in Iowa.

“We can process 99.9% of a blade and handle about 6,000 to 7,000 blades a year per plant,” said Chief Executive Officer Don Lilly. The company has accumulated an inventory of about one year’s worth of blades ready to be chopped up and recycled as demand increases, he said. “When we start to sell to more builders, we can take in a lot more of them. We’re just gearing up.”

It's not all doom and gloom ...

[ckil]

Just more petrochemicals needed in the recycling process. We will see the same issues with solar as well. From what I understand, the cells are toxic and cannot be reused.

[alanjh595]

Perhaps someone could use them to build a wall?

I was just thinking that. Actually, I was thinking of a way to join them up to build a house. Light, strong.
Oh ya, my imagination is off and away with these things.

I wonder how a house like that would do in a high wind?

[seewood]

I wonder how a house like that would do in a high wind?

Red shoes and a dog named Toto come to mind...

[common_sense_guy]

I'm throwing this idea out there:
1) Grind up used fiberglass
2) then add fresh fiber mix it together (to bind everything together)
3) infuse resin with mix into... 6 to 8 feet long... 4 inch diameter mould with a point.

Add paint pigment (any colour) to resin & bingo you have fence posts that will last decades.
If fade just take sander to them to restore the colour.

Added: must design something for mass production

Not feasible, or they would grind them to remake the parts or have more space to dispose of them. I think the cost will drive any propest of doing anything with them.

I disagree your statement that it's not feasible or they would be doing it. My belief would be there not doing it because it wasn't costed in in the first place when they built them for the recycling of them. If that factor was costed in there would be money to grind them down, which is a very easy to do and requires little Manpower. Now if you've cost it in for example. $500 per blade for its disposable Then there would be a company set up to earn that money with very little man power needed.

[featfan]

I love these shredding videos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzb6zDFg3WQ

[Jlabute]

These are older turbines. Newer turbines as their turn comes are more massive and more difficult to transport.

"In Minnesota, Xcel Energy estimates conservatively that it will cost $532,000 (in 2019 dollars) to decommission each of its wind turbines—a total cost of $71 million to decommission the 134 turbines in operation at its Noble facility. Decommissioning the Palmer’s Creek Wind facility in Chippewa County, Minnesota, is estimated to cost $7,385,822 for decommissioning the 18 wind turbines operating at that site, for a cost of $410,000 per turbine."

It is even more expensive to recycle off-shore turbines. If one had to decommission the 50,000 turbines in the USA right now, the costs are estimated to be around $10 billion. They need recycling every 20 years not including land restoration. If you wanted to recycle a very large blade, I'm not sure there is a shredder large enough to handle one, so tools would have to be created for this task. There could be some expensive processing on the front end, cutting blades in to more manageable chunks for a shredder. Maybe there is an industry there for composite materials, decking, fences, whatever. Or maybe we can stack the blades in to living structures for environmentalists? ;-)


https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/renewable/wind/the-cost-of-decommissioning-wind-turbines-is-huge/



Perhaps, the future of wind power is blade-less, oil-less, and gear-less?
https://vortexbladeless.com/technology-design/