Story dated June 2018 and it is just getting attention now.
The Green Movement’s dirty little secret!
……..and the real eco-warriors ain’t happy!
Wind turbine rotor blades are made from glass or carbon fibre reinforced composites and are extremely difficult to recycle at the present time. In Germany, Veolia is working to actively identify solutions to give the blades a new lease of life.
Up to 50,000 tonnes of rotor blade materials are expected to arrive in waste reception centres between now and 2020.
Wind power has been booming since the 2000s. It is no longer a surprise to see these immense windmills working at full capacity in the countryside or off the coast. And this is excellent news as wind turbines produce clean renewable energy. However, the picture is not so rosy when the time comes to recycle them.
Despite the fact that wind turbines have an estimated lifespan of 20-30 years, many of them can no longer be operated profitably due to the cut of governmentally subsidised feed-in-tariffs. Now that the first generation – those installed in the 1990s – are coming to the end of their service lives, the issue of how to recover the waste materials is coming to the fore. The first turbines to be dismantled have revealed an unexpected complication: wind turbine design is not always eco-friendly.
The rotor blades in particular are a problem although they are only 2% to 3% of the mass of an entire windmill. They are made with use of glass fibre (the older ones) or carbon fibre (the more recent models). These composite materials have the advantage of making rotor blades lighter and more robust but they are proving complicated to recycle. Up to 50,000 tonnes of rotor blade waste materials are expected to arrive at waste reception centres between now and 2020 without having an established recycling solution. Finding ways of giving them a fresh lease of life is therefore a major challenge.
Wind Turbine Blades Piling Up in Landfills: No Way to Recycle
H/T Bruntdog
Calamity Jane