Following up on Sept 21's "Solve This Wind Turbine Problem And Make Some BIG Money".
From Cheyanne WY's Wyoming News Now:
Casper Regional Landfill begins burying turbine blades
One wind farm in Glenrock and two from the Saratoga area have partnered with the Casper Regional Landfill to dispose of their old wind turbine blades.Low Tech Magazine says the answer is to make the blades of wood.
More than 900 blades will be brought to the landfill beginning now until the end of next spring.
The Casper Solid Waste Manager, Cynthia Langston, said that though most turbine blades can be reused, there are some that are simply un-recyclable.
"Ninety percent of the turbines are completely reclaimed, recycled, and reused, but there is ten percent that is fiberglass, so those are coming to us from three different farms in the state."
Langston said that though the motor houses can be crushed, the blades are too strong....MORE
I'm not sure the engineering folks are up to the task.
From LowTech:
How to Make Wind Power Sustainable Again
Translations:
fr
If we build them out of wood, large wind turbines could become a textbook example of the circular economy.For more than two thousand years, windmills were built from recyclable or reusable materials: wood, stone, brick, canvas, metal. When – electricity producing – wind turbines appeared in the 1880s, the materials didn’t change. It’s only since the arrival of plastic composite blades in the 1980s that wind power has become the source of a toxic waste product that ends up in landfills.
New wood production technology and design makes it possible to build larger wind turbines almost entirely out of wood again – not just the blades, but also the rest of the structure. This would solve the waste issue and make the manufacturing of wind turbines largely independent of fossil fuels and mined materials. A forest planted in between the wind turbines could provide the wood for the next generation of wind turbines.
How Sustainable is a Windmill Blade?
Wind turbines are considered to be a clean and sustainable source of power. However, while they can indeed generate electricity with lower CO2-emissions than fossil fuel power plants, they also produce a lot of waste. This is easily overlooked, because roughly 90% of the mass of a large wind turbine is steel, mainly concentrated in the tower. Steel is commonly recycled and this explains why wind turbines have very short energy payback times – the recycled steel can be used to produce new wind turbine parts, which greatly lowers the energy required during the manufacturing process.
However, wind turbine blades are made from light-weight plastic composite materials, which are voluminous and impossible to recycle. Although the mass of the blades is limited compared to the total mass of a wind turbine, it’s not negligible. For example, one 60 m long fiberglass blade weighs 17 tonnes, meaning that a 5 MW wind turbine produces more than 50 tonnes of plastic composite waste from the blades alone.
Image: A fiberglass reinforced plastic blade. Source: Gurit.
A windmill blade typically consists of a combination of epoxy – a petroleum product – with fiberglass reinforcements. The blades also contain sandwiched core materials, such as polyvinyl chloride foam, polyethylene terephtalate foam, balsa wood (intertwined in fibers and epoxy) and polyurethane coatings. 1234
Unlike the steel in the tower, the plastic in blades cannot be recycled to make new plastic blades. The material can only be “downcycled”, for instance by shredding it, which damages the fibers and makes them useless for anything but a filler reinforcement in cement or asphalt production. Other methods are being investigated, but they all run into the same problem: nobody wants the “recycled” material. Some architects have re-used windmill blades, for example to build benches or playgrounds. But we cannot build everything out of wind turbine blades....
....MUCH MORE
