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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.
[...] 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.
[...] Wind power is carbon-free and about 85% of turbine components, including steel, copper wire, electronics and gearing can be recycled or reused. But the fiberglass blades remain difficult to dispose of. With some as long as a football field, big rigs can only carry one at a time, making transportation costs prohibitive for long-distance hauls. Scientists are trying to find better ways to separate resins from fibers or to give small chunks new life as pellets or boards.
[...] "Wind turbine blades at the end of their operational life are landfill-safe, unlike the waste from some other energy sources, and represent a small fraction of overall U.S. municipal solid waste," according to an emailed statement from the group. It pointed to an Electric Power Research Institute study that estimates all blade waste through 2050 would equal roughly .015% of all the municipal solid waste going to landfills in 2015 alone.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Codesmith on Friday February 07 2020, @02:25PM (6 children)
https://www.compositesworld.com/blog/post/perhaps-were-getting-closer-to-fiberglass-recycling [compositesworld.com]
Took me about 15 seconds on Google. It's also pretty simple to bring them to ground level, break them into managable chunks with an excavalor with crushing head and feed them into a portable grinder. You know, the type you can feed a house into and get kibble. Toss it into a dump truck and take it to the nearest landfill.
Lots of complain'n goin' on, but no thinkin'.
Pro utilitate hominum.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 07 2020, @03:05PM (3 children)
How do you deal with the asbestos-like dust it creates in your simple solution that everyone but you is too dumb to figure out?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 07 2020, @03:38PM
Water spray.
(Score: 3, Touché) by DannyB on Friday February 07 2020, @04:03PM
One tried and true way of dealing with inconvenient truths: claim it is a hoax invented by the Chinese.
The thing about landline phones is that they never get lost. No air tag necessary.
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 07 2020, @04:16PM
Read the fucking linked article, dumb shit!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday February 07 2020, @05:46PM
I thought the complaint was that they are filling up the landfills... nice that you can grind them up (though that's actually not cheap to do, particularly if you've got a landfill nearby that will accept them whole).
Now: what is the fiberglass kibble good for, other than making the landfill fill up faster?
Last time I checked, the cost of disposal of a 30' fiberglass sailboat hull around here was around $2000, which is mostly the cost of grinding, plus a little for transportation and dumping fees. Nobody other than the dump seems to want the ground fiberglass for anything.
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(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Saturday February 08 2020, @11:36PM
Does fiberglass break down into harmful elements? If no, maybe they could bundle these turbine blades and use them for artificial reefs or such. Reuse them for things like fence posts and highway barriers. I'm sure there could be thousands of secondary uses.