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Wind Turbine Blades Can’t Be Recycled, So They’re Piling Up in Landfills
Companies are searching for ways to deal with the tens of thousands of blades that have reached the end of their lives.
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.
read the rest here
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turbine-blades-can-t-be-recycled-so-they-re-piling-up-in-landfills?fbclid=IwAR0i4oAenwRLSWYD78uLwvt79g9xn1grCn86gEKyNKOQPShuabEujjI-jqU
To make your argument true, what is the lifespan of the blades, and what is the makeup of materials in the blades that makes the blades throw away junk?
And I suppose coal ash pits leeching heavy metals and other toxins into ground water and contaminating peoples' drinking water supplies are soooooo much better?
A good example of how "green" energy sources can have have unseen impacts that aren't so "green". I support reasonable efforts to produce energy with less environmental impact, but sometimes the "impact" is just shifted from one resource to another. In our area a couple companies have recently been formulating programs to lease tracts of open land for solar farms, with the intent to sell the "green energy" generated to area utility companies to help them meet state green energy generation requirements. Our village owns about 25 acres (haven't a clue how many hectares that is) with about 15 acres open field and 10 acres of woods. The solar farm rep attended a village council meeting and stated that they would need 20 acres for the solar panel installation to be cost effective. When informed that there were only 15 acres of non-wooded land available, he very seriously asked if the village could "harvest and clear" all or part of the wooded area to provide the required acreage. One attended asked "so your plan is to cut the forest to protect natural resources, right"? Laughter ensued!
Thanks for sharing. It's only going to get worse. Another environmental problem is solar panels. They are made with hazardous and mined materials. And they don't decompose in the landfills.